Customizable cost wise quality Growroom controller (eventually for building yourself)

Growroom Design
21

Just that their base options don’t support what you need capacity wise, and you will have to get something custom built or build it yourself in order to fill your “wants” not necessarily your “needs”.

As for alarms sure you can have an alarm for every little thing wired and programmed out to there own ends, but tying things together would be more logical, as do you need to be warned that the water is high on table 2 and 4, or just that you have a single alarm that “a” table has a high water alarm.

So i have a question are you planning on growing, or just wanting to try to automate everything with more alarm points and control that you could shake a stick at. As after a point you gonna be spending more time , energy, and money, just building the room and having it work consistently, than even just growing in it.

Don’t get me wrong i love control aspect of it all, and would be here talking about it if i didn’t, but there is something to be said about trying to keep things simple, as the less you have to wire/calibrate/code/build the better.

Saying that a lot of safety measures can be built in without need for control, such as float switches that automatically turn on pumps, or prevent them from turning on if two low, to say having overflow pipes built into your tables, for those “oh shit” situations.

As for PLC’s they are just as @50State describes, the profession one are pricey and i have played with them in the past but they have a reason to be as they have to work no matter what, consider oil and gas plants, or nuclear reactors, they are all controlled by PLC’s, and are built with that longevity and space consideration in mind, as say an offshore drilling rig you don’t want your PLC or control module going out unexpectedly.

Now cheap chinese PID controllers can be had off ebay and they are just separate modular controllers that typically only control a couple functions, but for the most part its just temperature controllers and or timers and such, which covers what most home/hobbyist users will need. But if i was running/building a room i’d be probably going down that route myself, only reason im an arduino user is for the size and cheap cost for what i want it to do.

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22

So what actually is the next step is to see how can I make the solenoid system safe. Then I would know which sensor and alarms I still would need.

So I just thought about the problems that I could run into. And actually wonder how I could solve them.

Problems I could run into:

Problem: Reservoir empties out because of leak
Cause: somewhere must be a leak and the water gets lost somewhere instead of returningt
Effect: pump will burn out at the very end and floor will be spilled
countermeasure: some kind of water sensor on the floor which stops the pump and sends me an alarm
Questions: How to implement the alarm function? Which sensors to use? Is there a direct way or maybe indirectly by noticing that pump had stopped as there is no fluctuation in the reservoir anymore. Actually growduino has a waterheight sensor based on ultrasonic implemented?

Problem: Table doesn’t drain
Cause: drain solenoid is clogged or broken
effect: plants will die
countermeasure:

  • overflow drain will at least prevent the table from overflowing on the floor when the table fills the second time
  • install second drain solenoid, which would be coupled with the other solenoid. But how about the chance that the drain would also be clogged as the drains are close together?
  • I guess very important measure: some kind of alarm function that the table doesn’t drain
    Questions: How to implement alarm fuction? Which sensor to use for that?

Problem: Return pump does not pump the water back
Cause: Pump broken or clogged
effect: return reservoir will overfill and spill on the floor and main reservoir will empty out
countermeasure:

  • float switch which will stop the main reservoir pump
  • send me alarm, so I know something is not right
    Questions: how to implement alarm? what sensor to use for that?

Maybe you can help me answer these questions with your expertise and knowledge, as I think that they are crucial for being able to run the system reliable and keep it that way.

Other things to mention:

  • a sensor if all lamps are still running would be interesting; seems like growduino is using this by having a sensor for the temperature of the lamps
  • co2, humidity and temperature measuring is easy and having them would suffice as feedback if dehumidifier, heater, co2 generator are still runnning

So the most important step would be sorting out the waterflow system.

23

A warning sensor in this application is more or less a momentary button, say a float switch for example once it gets past a high or low level depending on how you orient it or how its built “NC vs NO”, it would switch to connecting that circuit instead of being open or visa versa. This is read by your controller depending on how its setup as an input change of state.

aka high state = nothing happens, low state = send off warning alarm and shut off pump solenoids ect.

as for how to to setup the alarm function, that would all be done in the programming of the controller.

Arduino it would be similar as follows

if (alarmPointH1 == LOW){
digitalWrite(solenoid1, LOW);
digitalWrite(feedPump, LOW);
//send txt or turn on a light or whatever ect ect
}

As for the ultrasonic sensor such as you mentioned it just measures the time it takes for the sound wave to be generated and bounced back to the sensor which is calculated in your controller to display a distance. Which is just another way to generate some data points for your controller which you then can use to do certain actions. Such as if(distance >= 30cm && <= 80cm){ *do whatever};

Really any of these open source diy’s system your gonna have to modify, whether coding and or physical connections in order for it to work the way you want it, as there really isn’t anything that’s plug and play apart from the basic stuff. Its the combining of things that changes it, so unless you get something specifically built for you, you’re probably gonna have to get into the details of how it works and how to build a system anyways, as say you find out that you need to add or change an alarm or function of the controller, you will need to modify the coding and or physical connections to accept that change.

That all aside and again certain things can be built and setup to avoid the controller all together, such as your feed voltage fro you pump running through a float switch barring safety considerations and such, but if the water gets too low it disconnects the circuit preventing your pump from running dry, or if a table is too full a switch flips to an open state causing the power to the pump to be cut off.

Also you should consider how your solenoids are built, are they normally open or closed. It would make sense for your drain solenoids to be NO and your intakes NC. As in a loss of power situation it means your tables wont flood, by allowing them to drain and preventing any water from coming in in a non powered state.

Anyways just start bit by bit, step by step, certain functions at a time as your not gonna get this all done and perfect in one shot, trust me on that.

I’d worry about getting the room up and running with manual or basic controls first before looking trying to get everything automating with alarm points as well, but that’s just my opinion.

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24

Thing is that the room will not run if the solenoid system isn’t working. Also if the system breaks down and I dont notice it, the room might not run for long anymore. All the other stuff I can handle myself. So far I am concerned with the solenoid and water detection system.

I sorted it out so far:

  • buy a raspberry pie 3
  • buy 50m of cat5e cable and combine pieces of that cable with these sensors Soil Moisture Sensor Kit | The Pi Hut
  • connect the sensors to the raspberry and use their digital output
  • buy solenoid valves and two relais Amazon.com
  • controlling the solenoid valves over the raspberry with the relais
  • write a nice little programm which will automate that and then maybe notify me if there is a problem

I was able to get a good standalone co2 controller and sensor pretty cheap. So I will not bother doing that myself. I am still thinking about adding humidity and temperature. But first I need the water system sorted out.

1 Like
25

Ok. I bought a raspberry Pi 3. I installed Openhabian on it. That is a really powerful homeautomation distribution for Pi based on on Openhab2 which is able to incorporate the devices of most home automation hardware producers.
I also installed mosquitto on the Pi. This is some software which uses a certain protocol which some devices need to communicate with the home automation software.
Then I bought NodeMCUs v2. It is some microcontroller based on esp8266. It has wifi also. I flashed them with ESPEasy and connected it to the mosquitto broker. I put the NodeMCUs on breadboards and I connected my watersensors to the NodeMCUs. The NodeMCUs send the signal of the watersensors to the mosquitto broker, which sends the information to the Openhab2.

In Openhab2 I can set all the rules I need for the rest.
I also got my hands on an irrigation controller (for 50 bucks) and good plastic magnetsolenoids (because of corrosion) from a nursery. The computer (from rainbird) is able to to handle the timers for 12 solenoids. It also starts the main pump over a relais. I can now control the irrigation computer with a wifi controllable switch which is controlled by openhabian. If there is somewhere a water leak registrated by the NodeMcus with the watersensors, a rule in Openhabian2 will take effect and shut down the irrigation computer (who also controls the main pump). Nicely done :wink:

The whole thing is a headless system. So you don’t need a monitor and keyboard stationary. You can just connect with your laptop. It is also cloud free. But I can access it, over a VPN server from the internet.

With my Openhab2 and microcontrollers, I am able to incorporate virtually every device I want into my homeautomation system. Next thing I will incorporate is temperature and humidity for every room and couple it with heating. After that I will look for ph and ec measurement for the main reservoir.

Nice thing is also, that you can use it for home security. You can work with rfid chips, alarms, infrared heat sensors which registrate if there is a person… But I didn’t look much into that yet.

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