The arduino garden project has taken a turn.

The ESP8266 is a board similar to the arduino but with a built in wifi chip. They are also very inexpensive. I was able to get three for the price of a single arduino duo.

• The issue I am running into is that the current board is tethered to my tablet. My tablet is running Windows 10, but it is kind of old and is unable to update. It is constantly requesting that I fix the update issue, but there is no fix. I want to try to install Linux on it. (That may not be possible, it's a weird chipset/setup and the internet is saying it's low probability).
• Loading from arduino to Tablet then to website seems fragile.
• My arduino is locked into this one job.

The ESP opens up a lot of possibilities. MQTT is a message queuing system that uses wifi allowing subsciptions would allow a bunch of sensors to communicate with each other, or a central system. But for the greenhouse project I'd be able to log the info directly to the server and skip the tablet all together.

Earlier today, while I was thinking that this solves a bunch of "problems" the electricity went out. The EPS, which I was testing at the time, was suddenly unable to upload because it no longer had access to wifi. Which is bringing me to the issues I'm currently thinking over. What do I do about data? Should I store the data on the chip, or locally somehow and then check to see if the server has it from time to time and then upload old data. For this project that's overkill, but it seems like an important question.