Offline solution, Python script with MQTT?

So I was thinking about making a greenhouse automation system for my father who has the problem that he can’t leave his house in the summers if it’s good weather, because he has to stay at home and take care of the plants, which is mainly watering.

He lives quite off on the countryside and it’s still one of those houses that you unplug all the sensitive electrical gadgets, like modems, when you leave if there’s any chance of thunder. This means that there would be sporadic Internet connection, which seems to be an issue with Cayenne, which is my top choice at the moment. And since it’s cloud based, I assume that all the triggers and events are so as well. Which means that it won’t work.

Could a possible solution be to just use a python script doing all the hard work, and then sending the information via MQTT to Cayenne for monitoring and controlling WHEN the Raspberry Pi has Internet access? If it doesn’t then everything essential works but there’s no way to monitor it until there’s Internet access again? I haven’t used MQTT yet, but read about it in several projects, so I can’t say I know exactly how functional it is and if Cayenne can receive all data via MQTT and control the RPi that way, and if there is a reasonably simple and efficient way of doing this.

What are your ideas and opinions?

That is correct

You can do that, however I’m not sure if there is yet a way to timestamp the data to make a complete graph. @bestes is that correct?

I think you are on the right path of using local triggers and Cayenne as a display of your data.