Growduino - environment control system

[r-man]

Guys - it has been long time, but Growduino V2 is ready! See this
And if You want, You can see my project Growduino V2 - it’s finished and can be manufactured!

Growduino

Growduino V2
After several years of development, Growduino V2 appears, a new and much more sophisticated version of the device for both manual and automatic, local and remote climate control and device control in closed cultivation environments. It measures everything from temperature and humidity, through water level and water temperature up to light intensity, EC, pH and CO2. It allows you to set up countless amounts of parameters, control lights, ventilation, humidification, irrigation, but also less traditional heating and refill the water, room heating, dehumidification and last but not least, CO2 dosing. Everything is in the graphs in the browser, you can watch and control your growroom from the other end of the world, even over your phone or tablet. By email you receive notifications when something is wrong, no standard device allows this. Growduino V2, of course, has SSL secure communication, you are logged in with the password, no one else gets to your device. Plus mega cool feature! A webcam to help you see what happens in the growroom day and night.

[r-man]

Hi Guys, pleased to anounce - WiFi connectivity is workning from now

[r-man]

Another piece from our own development is OptoBoard. Who knows what it’s for?

[anon58740919]

Replied on your FB page too.
This is exactly what I’ve been trying to wrap my head around for the past week.
Temperature controlled dimming is my guess.
I got as far as a PID controller. Thermistor and an optocoupler. With the SSR. I was leaning towards Arduino uno. And a pwm to 0-10v BoB. I know jack about code though. If you have achieved this then I tip my hat to you sir. Awesome

[r-man]

@anon58740919

Temperature controlled dimming

No…will wait for other to guess

[Northern_Loki]

Looks like a multi-channel AC/DC load controller.

The input AC is simply converted to provide the output DC control voltage power. Upper connector is the digital control input that is electrically decoupled from the output through the opto-isolators. The optoisolated voltage output drives the solid state relay. Four channels are populated. An actual AC load is not currently wired to the solid state relay.

@anon58740919’s idea has merit, too.

[r-man]

Yes! Northern_Loki like a Boss

Its simple but very efficient galvanic separation between Arduino/OrangePi and AC loaded SSRs. There are optocouplers on classic Arduino RelayBoard also, but the catch is, that it is powered by the same power source, so whem SSR gets damaged and AC strikes the DC side, it will go not over optocouplers, but over DC power into an Arduino and everything will burn. That’s the reason why we decided to make an OptoBoard with separated power source - to avoid this situation

[r-man]

Hi everybody - just proud to say, we are not sleeping, development is on full throttle!

Firmware updates - almost all bugs fixed (except one known), secured smtp login and alerts sending added, much better NTP time synchronizning, Ethernet and also WiFi now treated by much more reliable NetworkManager, all digital sensors read error detection displayed right on display…and many more

Web update - we have nearly finished new webpages - don’t hesitate to visit and take a look

Growduino - Smart solution for indoor growing automatic and monitoring

[r-man]

Hi guys, it has been so long time, but we’re working on new Growduino prototype.

The demand is simple - need to have sensors working on long wires. Much longer than 3-5 meters as usual in small growrooms.

So thanks to my friend, electronics developer and engineer, I’m testing Growduino V3, with optional galvanic isolation for all the sensors. And also all of them are digital, not analog. This is crucial in order to get rid of the dependence of the measurement on the cable length and hence changes in the power supply. I have tested 50m long cables for light, temperature&humidity, bulb temperature, water temperature, water level, EC, pH and also CO2 sensors now

[beacher]

This is a really amazing project! Has sensor technology gotten alot better since you’ve started? They seem more sophisticated in the newer versions.

[r-man]

Yes, this is much better. We stopped using DHT22 because of low reliability in a few last years, and now using BME280 for temperature and humidity. And also galvanically isolated power and communicaton
for all sensors is much more better. Very big difference - 5 meters vs 50 meters sensor cable.

Also it has been very expensive to develop machine like this, so if it can be spreaded into growers community and a few growers buy it from me, I’ll be glad. In this time my family budget is nearly 200K CZK (8000USD) in deficit …You can imagine what my wife is thinking about this project :-DDD

[lefthandseeds]

RJ11? Nice choice, I like it!

[r-man]

Yes, RJ-11. Simply because it’s very easy to adjust cable lenght and crimp new connectors in seconds.

[elweddo]

I see there is a V3 prototype being developed. When do you expect that to be ready for release?

Also, any plans to switch from arduino to circuitpython? If we buy a system can we customize it and access the source code. I would like to redirect/mirror the alerts to a cloud host to blend the data and develop my own charts.

thanks,
EW

[lefthandseeds]

I have a design for capacitive moisture sensors that you can print to PCBs that can be used with capacitive touch screen sensors on things like a PSOC. I think a $10 PSOC5 dev board could interface like 5-10 of them, and could send the data back using serial over USB.

I never did anything with it, but I could fill you in on the details if you wanted to try it.

[r-man]

It’s very easy - all the data are accessible from growduino by http request and growduino will return plain text , but formatted into json. So You could program a robot for sending requests to Growduino every minute and create your own charts from that data easily.
Alerts are sent by email, so receiving email is also easy, I think.

About circuitpython - I don’t see a reason why to switch. I may ask my programmer, but there is already a bunch of code written for Arduino (C++ like) and I really do not want to spend much more money for rewriting it without reason.

V3 is almost ready - everything is operatin now. We just need to finish new USND and EC sensors and it wil be all finished. But it works with the recent sensors very well also, so if You want to talk about ordering, just PM me please.

[r-man]

I spent a lot of time and also money, but first testing V3 prototype is here. Everything seems to work just fine.
There are many improvements over Growduino V2:

• We have fully galvanic isolation on all sensors (optional), so it’s much more resistant to interference.
• Sensor cables can be up to 50 meters long (when galvanic isolation is used) - this is guaranteed. We have tested 100 meters with no problem, but in “lab” environment
• All sensors are digital now. No analog transfer over long cables = no interference with measured values.
• New, improved and our own PCB design. Now we have MainBoard and PortBoard. So there is much less interconnect cables which could lead to failure due to poor contact.
• And many more internal improvements…

If you are interested, just send me PM.

[r-man]

Hi guys, after many tests and small improvements I can say, that Growduino V3 is ready for production. just sent me PM

Recent updates:
UPS controlled shutdown
We should have had this a long time ago, it just didn’t work out. As soon as the battery drops below 6%, the machine switches off in a controlled manner. There is no risk of data loss or system crash and the need to reinstall. And it’s made a little smarter - energy has to be below 6%, MainPower has to be turned off, both have to be at least 3 minutes in a row. This eliminates premature or more frequent shutdowns with different types of crashes / throws.

EC Fan
We can control any EC fan with 0-10V standard. The user can set either ON (permanently on), OFF (permanently off), AUTO (classic on / off in Day / Night mode depending on temperature + humidity + CO2 + regular ventilation) or EC. In EC mode, you can also set the times for Day / Night mode as you wish, but you can also set the percentage of power depending on temperature, humidity and CO2. The control logic correctly recognizes which performance needs to be set, which value has exceeded the limit. Of course, there is minimal speed, where you can also set 0-100%.
Because different fan manufacturers have different connectors, we make a custom “converter” for it. The entire EC ventilation system, including the converter, costs + 500, -, which is much cheaper than any EC Fan controller.
In addition, you can see the% of fan power in the graph, so you can compare in history what the values ​​were on the sensors and how many% at that moment the fan was running, and thus you have the opportunity to fine-tune the settings.
We will improve it even more, the user settings will be like that of MSI in its Afterburner, I’m really looking forward to it:

pH
We now use a faster and more accurate pH calibration equation depending on the range of the AD converter in the sensor. The sensor is in-house made because the only reasonably functional one was AtlasScientific in our tests, but it is very expensive. In addition, it was not galvanically isolated, which causes interference with other immersion sensors. Now we have the same good, with galvanic separation and much cheaper (59,-€)

EC
Same as pH, including price.

CO2
The same as at pH, the price is (89,-€). The range has been reduced from the original analog 400-40000PPM to 400-5000PPM, which, among other things, allows for more precise control of ventilation and dosing, because we still do not want to exceed 2000PPM for plants. Day / Night mode is a matter of course.

[50State]

Do you plan to make a North American version at some point? I’d be interested in a Mega unit with all the bells and whistles.

[r-man]

Due to extremely expensive postage price and due to unbelievable stupid US law we can not ship to USA. But North American can be also Canada, right? Just PM me…