Plant-e

Installation

It is recommended to use VSCode as an IDE, along with micropy-cli as it provides:

• Linting
• Dependency management
• Version Control System (VCS) compatibility

To set up the project on a local machine for development:

# Clone project
git clone https://github.com/LoJunKai/Plant-e.git
cd Plant-e

# Create virtual environment
python3 -m venv env
source env/bin/activate

# Install packages
python3 -m pip install micropy-cli pylint

# Set up Micropy environment locally
micropy

Flashing Firmware

This project uses custom MicroPython firmware with camera and BLE support. The firmware was compiled using esp-idf 4.x (hash 4c81978a3e2220674a432a588292a4c860eef27b).

The firmware is included in the firmware folder. To flash it to the board:

# Install esptool
python3 -m pip install esptool

# Only needed if flashing for the first time
esptool.py --chip esp32 --port /dev/ttyUSB0 erase_flash

# Flash the firmware
esptool.py --chip esp32 --port /dev/ttyUSB0 --baud 460800 write_flash -z 0x1000 micropython_3a9d948_esp32_idf4.x_ble_camera.bin

Usage

Create config.py in the root directory with the following content:

wifi_config = {
    "ssid":"<wifi ssid>",
    "password":"<wifi password>"
}

1. Run upycraft
2. Plug in FTDI and press connect - flash if necessary
3. Take out the connection between GND and IO0 and press the reset button - unplug and plug in the FTDI if necessary
4. Press connect on upycraft
5. DownloadAndRun all the files to load it into ESP32
6. To over-write files, press Stop > DownloadAndRun > reset button on esp32

If module not found error comes up, put in:

import upip
upip.install("<module here>")

Temporary fix (without ngrok)

• Esp32 would send images over to DB every hr (except at night)
• Server would serve a collage of 2 photos

Reference Materials

• ESP32 MicroPython Firmware Download
• Flashing with esptool
• Using uPyCraft

How to connect FTDI to ESP32: