DIY Automatic hydro Grow

rolln1up

rolln1up

Well-Known Member
The Project: Build a grow room that can be operated by a computer which allows for monitoring visually through a webcam, and through sensors to include air/water temp., RH, PH, & EC. It will also be capable of adjusting all grow conditions and maintain an ideal environment at all times. I will be building and designing much of this myself with the goal of it being as cheap as possible and still be very functional. Any comments, questions, or suggestions are welcomed here. I plan on making this journal very comprehensive as to everything I do to get it working with enough detail for someone to follow and duplicate my process so if I leave something out let me know.

The Grow Room:The grow room I am using as the experiment is a 4' x 3' x 7' cabinet that bought form home Depot for $108, fitted with a 400 watt HID light $230. MH for veg and a HPS for flower. It contains two 18 Gal Tupperware containers fitted with 3 plants each in a DWC. Exhaust is a 50 CFM fan from home depot $12.

Computer and supplies: I got this computer given to me sometime ago and its an old HP with an 800 MHZ processor and 126 MB ram. The connection for the keyboard on the mother board has gone bad and the cable must be pulled down for it to make connection and work, As it will be operated remotely it will not be a problem. Webcam is an aiptek with built in camera capture button. Old as shit but also free. I have installed PClinxOS on the computer as the OS but this may change to slackware or another distro depending on problems I run into The basic design for the serial port controller is here

I will be heavily modify it to run the controllers but it the basic start. I will be programing it using freeBASIC and the freebasiccompiler; both applications free on Linux. My experience with basic programing is limited so if anyone has experience and would like to help let me know as I am sure I will need it. I have a design for the tempiture sensor and EC sensor as well but I will upload those later as I need to upload the circuits. Well that should give you a basic idea of the project I will post as I work on it PEACE
 
email468

email468

Well-Known Member
subscribed - there are quite a few computer folks on here - i am a sys-admin (UNIX) and loudblunts is a network admin and there are some coders on here too.

unfortunately, i know nothing about basic but if you need some shell scripting done or Perl - let me know.

in the meanwhile - good luck -- i'll be watching this one!
 
toolage

toolage

Well-Known Member
+rep for this one, i dont know anything about that kind of stuff but I will purchase the software from you when you finish it lol :bigjoint:
 
LoudBlunts

LoudBlunts

Well-Known Member
wow...i want in. although im completely confused on how you'd do it. i've been interested for a long time about this....but i hate programming. fuckin A!!!

im completely at your services! network help signing in!!!
 
rolln1up

rolln1up

Well-Known Member
I've decide to switch OS to Ubuntu because I have experience with similar setups using it am having problems with ssh and vnc on PClinuxOs. I want to thank everyone for the support. I'll get pics of the computer grow room and cam pics online soon

email468 is there a way to allow access to a web page hosting live images of grow room and current conditions whale keeping my location secure. I have used proxys before but I don't think I could use one and still host a webpage. It not a big issue but I thought alive feed showing what I'm monitoring and controlling could really add to the journal but I don't want to broadcast where I am.
 
email468

email468

Well-Known Member
rolln1up said:
I've decide to switch OS to Ubuntu because I have experience with similar setups using it am having problems with ssh and vnc on PClinuxOs. I want to thank everyone for the support. I'll get pics of the computer grow room and cam pics online soon

email468 is there a way to allow access to a web page hosting live images of grow room and current conditions whale keeping my location secure. I have used proxys before but I don't think I could use one and still host a webpage. It not a big issue but I thought alive feed showing what I'm monitoring and controlling could really add to the journal but I don't want to broadcast where I am.
Click to expand...
record on a webcam and post the movie of it rather than a live feed would be my knee-jerk reaction.

i've never had to do anything like that but i would think as much control you have over your network would be important. Multiple IPs and control over DNS would be, I think a requirement for any kind of real security - anyone else have any thoughts about this?

You would also have to rotate your IPs all the time and redirect from something like tiny DNS and then redirect to a fake IP that actually responds to http requests. Hmmmm. anonymous browsing is one thing - but anonymous serving is tricky i think!
 
LoudBlunts

LoudBlunts

Well-Known Member
email468 said:
record on a webcam and post the movie of it rather than a live feed would be my knee-jerk reaction.

i've never had to do anything like that but i would think as much control you have over your network would be important. Multiple IPs and control over DNS would be, I think a requirement for any kind of real security - anyone else have any thoughts about this?

You would also have to rotate your IPs all the time and redirect from something like tiny DNS and then redirect to a fake IP that actually responds to http requests. Hmmmm. anonymous browsing is one thing - but anonymous serving is tricky i think!
Click to expand...
correct.

i would also create a macro so it would actually post the video at decided times or whenever you wanted it to update it self.
 
Maccabee

Maccabee

Well-Known Member
Ubuntu is generally a good choice. Or maybe just plain Debian, for more hackish stuff like this.

So far as remote access is concerned, I would run a VPN and make sure that only internal and VPN hosts can access the garden subnet. I wouldn't try and create a public live feed, doesn't seem like a good idea.

In fact, I might run a 'vanilla' VPN on the expected ports and then do some kind of port knocking routine to open a second VPN on a higher port, and use that for garden system access.

But I'm paranoid about things like that.

Anyway, have a look at these links:

uC Hobby » Blog Archive » Sprinkler control with embedded linux

Acacia Projects - Sprinkler Controller

ASABE Technical Library :: Abstract

Valves for irrigation control?

Computer Automated HydroPonics - The Garden's Cure

The Garden's Cure "Totally Automated Part Deux"

I'm interested in this.
 
email468

email468

Well-Known Member
Maccabee said:
Ubuntu is generally a good choice. Or maybe just plain Debian, for more hackish stuff like this.

So far as remote access is concerned, I would run a VPN and make sure that only internal and VPN hosts can access the garden subnet.

In fact, I might run a 'vanilla' VPN on the expected ports and then do some kind of port knocking routine to open a second VPN on a higher port, and use that for garden system access.

But I'm paranoid about things like that.

Anyway, have a look at these links:

uC Hobby » Blog Archive » Sprinkler control with embedded linux

Acacia Projects - Sprinkler Controller

ASABE Technical Library :: Abstract

Valves for irrigation control?

I'm interested in this.
Click to expand...
The VPN is a great idea for him to access the controls over a network - but i think he was talking about making it available to the public (us).
 
Maccabee

Maccabee

Well-Known Member
email468 said:
The VPN is a great idea for him to access the controls over a network - but i think he was talking about making it available to the public (us).
Click to expand...
Yeah, I added a clarification with a quick ninja edit.

I think grabbing a still or a 15 second clip and slapping it up somewhere via a script run from cron is a better idea.
 
Maccabee

Maccabee

Well-Known Member
rolln1up

rolln1up

Well-Known Member
Thanks everyone for the help!

Okay here is what i have so far. I installed Ubuntu, setup remote access using the GUI for VNC that can be found by going to Systems>Preferences>Remote Desktop and setting things according to ones needs. I than spent the next 4 hours or so trying different webcam programs to fine one that worked with my webcam. Some worked but didn't allow for repeating picture capture, others didn't work at all, some showed multiple cascading reaping images that made it unusable, but I finally found Camstream(download from synaptic) which works great and allows for picture capture and has a nice GUI so I don't have to run it from the command line. Camstream's only drawback is that it stores captured images in the directory in which it was ran from so I will have to make a script that can start it from the directory I wish to save the images to but for now I am starting it manually through the terminal. One of the perks to Camstream is that using VNC I am able to actually see the current video being displayed by it, something that I have notice VNC will usely not do as I don't believe is able to streams video. My guess is it displays the video as a series of pics and this is why it is possible but anyways it makes for a better experience so props to the developers. Okay so I moved the computer on top of the grow room and added the webcam inside of the grow room. In doing so I ran straight into a problem with the image. There are dark bands going across the image. I believe this is caused most likely by the frequency of the HID light interfering with the scan rate of the webcam. So I am going to have to purchase a better webcam for viewing but the images are good enough to show leaf color and canopy density so it's not all a wast. I have included a pic of the webcam to show what I mean. Okay so I have been doing some research and have found that it may be considerable easier to use the parallel port as I can control the pins logic level individual and have no need for and interface board if I do it this was all I would need a an isolation circuit a some relays to I hope to have a parallel cable connected to some LEDs today so I can begin testing on that part.

Okay now that I can capture images I will probable also be setting up a webserve running Apache to host the images so I don't have to VNC into it evertime. I will also be setting up SSH to tunnel VNC in so as to increase security because I am aware to the security issues with VNC but for now I think it will be fine, I hope.
 
Maccabee

Maccabee

Well-Known Member
Take a look at this too. It's software from someone who was posting in an old CW thread I found through the Wayback machine.

JAuto: http://www.geocities.com/ngc7579/



It might be easier to get help working on a Java based product rather than something in Basic, and this is something that kind of exists although it appears work stopped on it a long time ago. It'd be cool if the community here could revive it.

The thread that the above link comes from:
http://web.archive.org/web/20021218111424/www.cannabisworld.com/ubb/Forum10/HTML/001271.html
 
rolln1up

rolln1up

Well-Known Member
Okay heres what I've got so far. After researching the parallel port pin out heres what I cam up with. Pins 2-9 are I/O pins and 18-25 are ground. So I set about build a simple led connector to allow me to test the parallel port and my programs; the current limiting resistors are 470 ohm. To test the parallel port and my connector I am using a program called parashell which allows for the TTL level of the pins to be set through the terminal. The second picture is of the connector displaying the digital word 255 although I think it's hard to tell they are lit but they are.




 
toolage

toolage

Well-Known Member
NICE WORK!!!! This is one hell of a thread, yalls IT skills are insane!! Are you going to be able to play you plant growth in super fast foward and watch em grow before your eyes lol? +rep
 
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