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

This post details a personal project building a houseplant alerting system using a Raspberry Pi, capacitive soil moisture sensors, and Apache Kafka. It covers the hardware assembly, including wiring and I2C address management for multiple sensors. The data pipeline involves producing sensor readings and plant metadata to Kafka topics, then using ksqlDB for stream processing to determine watering needs and trigger alerts. The author chose Confluent Cloud for its ease of setup and Kafka for its stream processing capabilities, contrasting it with MQTT for IoT data.