Apache Kafka at Home: A Houseplant Alerting System with ksqlDB | Confluent Using Data Pipelines for a Real-Time Alerting System

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This post details building an end-to-end IoT alerting system for houseplants using Confluent Cloud and ksqlDB. It covers hardware setup with Raspberry Pi and I2C capacitive soil moisture sensors, data ingestion into Kafka topics ('houseplants-readings', 'houseplants-metadata') using a Python producer, and stream processing with ksqlDB to determine watering needs. The post also discusses the choice of Kafka over MQTT for stream processing and persistence, and the importance of message structuring and topic design.