SmartyPlants Keeps Plant Parents in the Know with Golioth OTA
SmartyPlants created a smart plant monitor to help plant parents take care of their plants and needed a way to update their firmware remotely.
SmartyPlants discovered Golioth through a search for specific capabilities: reliable, rollback-protected over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates.
With documentation, an active forum, and responsive customer support, Okosun was able to integrate Golioth into their firmware successfully.
More Than Half of People Struggle to Care for Their Plants
More than half of people in the UK struggle to properly care for their plants. That insight was the founding spark for SmartyPlants, a UK-based startup that set out to take the guesswork out of plant parenthood with a five-sensor smart monitor that gives real-time, personalized care recommendations straight to a companion mobile app. After a highly successful Kickstarter, SmartyPlants is now shipping their smart plant monitor to over 49 countries around the world.
Building the hardware was the straightforward part. The ESP32-C3 microcontroller gave the team Wi-Fi connectivity out of the box, and its popularity in the IoT world meant a fast path to market. The device packs five sensors, measuring moisture, nutrients, temperature, light, and humidity, to paint a complete picture of a plant's needs at any given moment.
The harder problem was the infrastructure in the middle. Firmware engineer Adesuwa Okosun explains, "The biggest challenge was always going to be the cloud. Without it, you're not able to send your data from the firmware to the app. And once your device is in the field, you're probably not going to have access to it physically again. If you don't have a good cloud infrastructure, if you don't have a good OTA infrastructure, you're going to fail as a business."
“...If you don't have a good cloud infrastructure, if you don't have a good OTA infrastructure, you're going to fail as a business.”
The team initially used Blynk as a starting point, but quickly hit a ceiling. Blynk's proprietary app ecosystem left SmartyPlants with little flexibility to build their own experience, limited visibility into system behaviour, and no clear path to scale. The obvious alternatives—AWS, Google Cloud, Azure—would have been powerful but expensive and demanding of engineering time the small team didn't have. SmartyPlants needed a managed IoT platform that would get out of their way and let them build.
A Need To Support Custom Firmware Remotely
Ben Beavers, SmartyPlants' founder, found Golioth the way a lot of great tools get discovered: a late-night search. While researching IoT infrastructure options, a Google and ChatGPT search surfaced Golioth. He reached out to the team directly, and around 9 pm that same evening he sent Okosun a link with a simple message: "Check this out." By the next morning, it was clear they'd found what they were looking for.
"I saw that they were offering every single thing that we wanted, and even more. You're not tied to the system. You're able to do whatever you want to do. The flexibility Golioth offered was what we needed at that point in time and at the scale at which we were growing," Okosun detailed.
Where Blynk had locked them in and the hyperscale clouds would have stretched the team thin, Golioth offered a purpose-built IoT platform with one capability that stood out above everything else: reliable, rollback-protected over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates.
For a consumer IoT product shipped directly to homes across the globe, the ability to remotely fix bugs, add features, and respond to edge cases, without ever touching a device physically, was a real requirement.
Okosun elaborates, "Once you ship a device out, you don't have access to it physically. With Golioth's OTA, if there is a bug we can fix it and push the update to the affected devices. And if an OTA fails, it rolls back to the previous version automatically. That rollback mechanism has been remarkable for us."
New Implementation Means New Reach
Okosun integrated Golioth into the ESP32-C3 firmware by working through Golioth's documentation and leaning on the team's forum and direct support channels. Responses to questions in the community forum arrived within three to four hours, and Golioth team members were reliably available over email.
The integration unlocked a full IoT backend without any infrastructure overhead: device management, real-time data pipelines, and most importantly, a production-grade OTA update system.
To protect customers, SmartyPlants developed a staged OTA rollout process:
- All firmware changes are validated on internal devices first.
- Updates are then pushed to a controlled group of 50 to 100 known users in the UK who can be contacted if an issue arises.
- Only after passing both stages does a release go out to the broader user base.
That discipline proved its value early. A customer with a 64-character Wi-Fi password discovered that the device's original 32-character limit was blocking them from connecting. The fix seemed simple: expand the character limit in firmware and push an OTA update. But during internal testing, the team discovered a deeper problem: the memory changes required for longer passwords caused devices to disconnect from Golioth mid-update, leaving them unable to complete the flash and become temporarily unresponsive.
Because the bug surfaced in the internal stage, no customer devices were affected. SmartyPlants manually flashed replacement units and swapped them out for the affected customer. The incident became a broader lesson about memory constraints in OTA workflows. Okosun explains, "It's very important that when you're writing your firmware, you ensure you have little or no memory issues before you ship to the market. An OTA won't fix an underlying hardware constraint. Our staged process means we catch those things before they ever reach a customer."
The Results
With Golioth handling the IoT infrastructure, SmartyPlants has been able to focus entirely on the product experience and grow their customer base to over 2,000 happy plant parents across the world.
What SmartyPlants gained:
- OTA confidence: The team ships firmware updates without hesitation, trusting that Golioth's rollback mechanism means a failed update never leaves a device permanently broken.
- Faster time to market: By avoiding the months of engineering effort required to self-host cloud infrastructure on AWS or Azure, SmartyPlants was able to launch and iterate quickly.
- Customer satisfaction: Testimonials consistently cite both the smart monitoring capabilities and the hands-on support SmartyPlants is able to provide—support that would be harder to deliver without reliable remote device management.
- Lean team, full capability: A single firmware engineer was able to integrate a complete, production-grade IoT backend, from data pipelines to OTA updates, without a dedicated infrastructure team.
Conclusion
SmartyPlants is proof that a small, focused team with the right infrastructure partner can build a consumer IoT product that delights customers and scales reliably. Golioth's OTA system with its staged rollout support and automatic rollback has become the backbone of how SmartyPlants maintains and improves their product once it's in the field.
About SmartyPlants
SmartyPlants is a UK-based consumer IoT company on a mission to help people understand and care for their plants. Their smart monitor combines five sensors with a companion mobile app to deliver personalised, real-time plant care recommendations. Loved by over 2,000 plant parents, SmartyPlants is available at smartyplants.co.uk.
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