I Gave My Plant a Brain. It Turned Into a Bunny.
UNIHIKER K10 Review — ESPHome, Home Assistant, and an AI-Powered Plant Caretaker
Quick Take: The UNIHIKER K10 gave me a camera, sensors, screen and speaker in one little board. With ESPHome and Home Assistant, it became Nibble: an animated rabbit that checks on my plant, keeps a 30-entry AI-assisted photo journal and reads me a daily bulletin. A few adventures and headaches later, he's actually working.
I'd been dreaming again, this time about an automation that could look at a recent photo of my plants, consider things like temperature, humidity, and light, and use AI to help determine when they need water.
Eventually, I'd love to control how much water and additional light gets delivered based on that information. Maybe even incorporate watering and lighting history and see how the plant responds.
You know, just for the stem of it.
I started putting the pieces together in Home Assistant.
I pulled out my old ESP32-CAM and then remembered that little standalone camera board was flaky. At least mine was. Getting a reliable image out of it was turning into more of a project than the actual plant automation.
And then, almost perfectly timed, a package arrived from DFRobot.
Inside was the UNIHIKER K10.
I quickly abandoned my original plans for the K10 and ditched the old camera. Thank you, universe!
I mean, honestly, how perfect was this thing for what I was trying to do?
Leafing no sensor unturned
The K10 is an ESP32-S3 development board with a color display, camera, temperature and humidity sensors, light sensor, accelerometer, microphones, speaker, RGB LEDs, and physical buttons.
That's a pretty nice collection in one little package.
For my project, it meant I could bring the camera, sensors, and physical interface together without wiring up a bunch of separate components or using separate sensors. It’s all on board.
I played around with DFRobot's Mind+ software for maybe 15 minutes before abandoning that in favor of ESPHome. I'm much more familiar with ESPHome, and Home Assistant was the plan all along anyway.
That's when my imagination started to wander… again.
I wasn't really looking for another dashboard or remote control. I wanted something with personality. Something fun for my smart home.
The vision was... walk up to the plant, see how it's doing, flip through a photo diary, and potentially have a slightly ridiculous rabbit tell me whether the plant is happy.
Maybe he'd even sing to the plants when I'm not in the office.
My Plant Brain
Nibble is my AI-powered rabbit plant caretaker. He's part plant monitor, part photo journal, and part ridiculous little companion.
The K10 handles the camera, sensors, display, and animated rabbit. Home Assistant handles the intelligence, automations, and history.
I got a lot of help from AI building the custom interface and Home Assistant integration. It's been a pretty fun exercise in turning an idea into something that actually works. And even if it’s only vibe coded, I got a deeper look at how some pieces fit together in Home Assistant and ESPHome.
When Nibble checks on the plant, Home Assistant captures a photo along with the temperature, humidity, and light readings. The AI Task action in Home Assistant assesses the plant's visible condition and generates a little narrative.
Everything gets saved in a journal that keeps the most recent 30 entries.
So now my plant has a photo diary. And a rabbit that has opinions about it.
Nibble has three pages on the K10:
- Home: His animated face, plant health, and live environmental readings. I can also ask him to read his latest bulletin or create a new AI journal entry.
- Journal: A photo diary I can flip through using the physical buttons, complete with dates, health assessments, and Nibble's commentary.
- Sensors: A dedicated page for the environmental readings.
Select a photo to view it at full size.
The RGB lights change color to match Nibble’s plant-health status, and you can change scenes as well. A soft glow when everything looks good? Maybe a little shimmer when he's particularly pleased?
Why not?
Of Course, He Has a Home Assistant Dashboard
I built a custom animated Home Assistant card that mirrors the main functions of the K10. I can check Nibble's health, browse his journal, or trigger a new AI assessment without touching the device.
The card and K10 share the same history through a custom Home Assistant integration that manages the journal and photos.
Nibble also has his own AI text-to-speech voice, with a deliberately bouncy, rabbit-like personality.
I created a Daily Bunny Bulletin automation, too. Once the office has been occupied for five minutes, Nibble can give me a plant update, once per day.
So now I have a rabbit that greets me with news about a plant.
This is exactly the kind of nonsense I love building.
Make Sure You're Running the Fucking Code You're Editing
Getting Nibble's camera working turned into a much bigger adventure than expected.
The photos were upside down. Every time I fixed the orientation, they ended up mirrored instead. Or the image on the K10 looked different from the one in Home Assistant.
I tried different ESPHome camera settings, reflashed the K10 more times than I care to admit, and eventually added image rotation and cropping to the custom Home Assistant integration.
Except Home Assistant kept rejecting a configuration setting that was clearly in the code!
Apparently, Nibble had learned a magic trick. Now you see the code, now you don't.
After hours of chasing tails, I discovered an old backup folder interfering with the newer version.
So there I was, troubleshooting code that wasn't even the code being used. One of those moments when you question your sanity.
When the photos finally displayed properly on both the K10 and my Home Assistant dashboard, I almost did a kickflip right in my office.
To be fair to the K10, this was mostly an adventure in my custom code, not a hardware failure.
My Thoughts on the K10
As for the UNIHIKER K10, I've had a lot of fun with this little board.
What I like most is how much hardware there is already. The camera, screen, sensors, speaker, buttons, and lights give you a lot of directions to explore without having to assemble everything yourself. I even added a Sendspin media player to mine.
I went from wanting a better camera to building an animated, AI-powered rabbit with a photo journal and his own little voice.
The UNIHIKER K10 is made for tinkering. What are you going to build with yours?
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