Sensor-to-dashboard for vertical farming
A production ingestion pipeline — Raspberry Pi over mTLS, FastAPI, Postgres — feeding live dashboards and an assistant.
A vertical farming operation needed to see what was happening across its racks in real time — temperature, humidity, and more — and to trust that data enough to act on it.
The system
Raspberry Pi gateways read sensors at the edge and ship readings to a FastAPI ingestion service backed by Postgres. From there the data feeds operator dashboards and a retrieval assistant for natural-language questions about the farm.
- Edge — Pi gateways with a local reader and a resilient uplink.
- Transport — readings published over mutual-TLS MQTT; every device authenticates with its own client certificate.
- Ingest — a FastAPI service validates and stores readings, with health checks and structured logging throughout.
Why mTLS mattered
Field devices on untrusted networks can't authenticate with a shared secret you can't rotate. We issued a per-device certificate from a private CA, enforced an ACL so a gateway can only publish its own farm's topics, and wired certificate revocation in — so a lost Pi can be cut off without touching the others.
The outcome
A pipeline that's observable end to end and secure by construction: operators get live dashboards they trust, and the platform can onboard new farms by issuing a certificate rather than re-architecting.
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