Don't do what I did

[MisterKister]

I have automation so I can actually leave my house for a week or more at a time. It's invaluable for respite...lol but yeah I use trolmaster and I've had their co2 control station take a shit on me already. I also use smartlife and haven't had any issues whatsoever. But then again I live in an area where power and internet outages are very rare

 

[LeastExpectedGrower]

some people want to grow weed, and some people want to play with electronics...i have the ability to automate, but i don't. you can get graphs and charts on your phone, and they mean shit. go look at your plants, bend over and look at undergrowth, at the bottoms of leaves, smell the room, feel the humidity on your skin, feel the texture of leaves, feel the flexibility of stalks and stems...20,000 plus years of agriculture, 20 years of automation...i know which way i'm going

Using one doesn't preclude the other.

 

[Roger A. Shrubber]

Using one doesn't preclude the other.

no, it does not, but i highly recommend gaining significant proficiency at growing before you try automating...you don't even know what it is you're trying to automate till you have at least a couple of successful hands on grows under your belt...
but it's not for me, blumats are all the automation i need.

 

[LeastExpectedGrower]

no, it does not, but i highly recommend gaining significant proficiency at growing before you try automating...you don't even know what it is you're trying to automate till you have at least a couple of successful hands on grows under your belt...
but it's not for me, blumats are all the automation i need.

See, blumats for me are more automation alone than all my stuff combined. The rest is just climate controlling (temp/humidity triggered exhaust/intake fans, humidifier triggers, timers for lights and fans.).

 

[Roger A. Shrubber]

See, blumats for me are more automation alone than all my stuff combined. The rest is just climate controlling (temp/humidity triggered exhaust/intake fans, humidifier triggers, timers for lights and fans.).

i do use timers for my lights, guess that's one more piece of automation

 

[LeastExpectedGrower]

i do use timers for my lights, guess that's one more piece of automation

I do all my watering and feeding by hand. The rest of my tent environmental conditions I run timers/sensors and adjust on the fly as needed.

Someday we'll have an automated light system that you can dial in by wifi light sensor and things will be even more precise.

When I see analog temp/RH, etc. in tents I think 'that's great...' but I know when I even open the tent for a few moments all the stability of the system is off the tracks right away. So I'm not sure people who aren't remote reading that stuff know what the actual tent situation is. On the other hand, I can review my nighttime conditions the next morning (first thing I do before even going downstairs and look at the plants and checking the soil) and if something needs adjusting I can do it. I generally look at all the plants first thing in the morning then at night once I'm home from work or whatever. I measure every couple days, or if things are really moving, once a day.

My watering/feeding schedule with ProMix and 5g pots right now is about 3-4 days apart, so I can go away for a weekend and not worry too much. I'll be getting some Blumats for longer stretches in the near future, since Mrs. LEG won't take to scheduling anything around growing needs.

 

[MisterKister]

I do all my watering and feeding by hand. The rest of my tent environmental conditions I run timers/sensors and adjust on the fly as needed.

Someday we'll have an automated light system that you can dial in by wifi light sensor and things will be even more precise.

When I see analog temp/RH, etc. in tents I think 'that's great...' but I know when I even open the tent for a few moments all the stability of the system is off the tracks right away. So I'm not sure people who aren't remote reading that stuff know what the actual tent situation is. On the other hand, I can review my nighttime conditions the next morning (first thing I do before even going downstairs and look at the plants and checking the soil) and if something needs adjusting I can do it. I generally look at all the plants first thing in the morning then at night once I'm home from work or whatever. I measure every couple days, or if things are really moving, once a day.

My watering/feeding schedule with ProMix and 5g pots right now is about 3-4 days apart, so I can go away for a weekend and not worry too much. I'll be getting some Blumats for longer stretches in the near future, since Mrs. LEG won't take to scheduling anything around growing needs.

We already have that ability with a trolmaster hydro -x pro model

 

[Roger A. Shrubber]

I do all my watering and feeding by hand. The rest of my tent environmental conditions I run timers/sensors and adjust on the fly as needed.

Someday we'll have an automated light system that you can dial in by wifi light sensor and things will be even more precise.

When I see analog temp/RH, etc. in tents I think 'that's great...' but I know when I even open the tent for a few moments all the stability of the system is off the tracks right away. So I'm not sure people who aren't remote reading that stuff know what the actual tent situation is. On the other hand, I can review my nighttime conditions the next morning (first thing I do before even going downstairs and look at the plants and checking the soil) and if something needs adjusting I can do it. I generally look at all the plants first thing in the morning then at night once I'm home from work or whatever. I measure every couple days, or if things are really moving, once a day.

My watering/feeding schedule with ProMix and 5g pots right now is about 3-4 days apart, so I can go away for a weekend and not worry too much. I'll be getting some Blumats for longer stretches in the near future, since Mrs. LEG won't take to scheduling anything around growing needs.

i'm almost always home. i walk in my garden, and feel that it's a little too humid, and i turn up the exhaust fan. i watch the weather, and know when it's going to be especially warm or cold, and deal with it as it happens. i realize some people have to travel, and if they want to automate, then that's their business, but i'm hardly ever gone more than two days at a time, and would rather deal with it hands on

 

[MisterKister]

Automation sure as heck beats relying on a buddy to tend your plants and has no idea what's he's doing and kills your crop

 

[speedwell68]

I want to be in a position where I can leave my grow for a week at a time, even though I am home most of the time. I grow in a loft. It is not always convenient to be up and down the loft ladder all the time and I like to go away on long weekends in my camper van.

I have "smart" control over the lights. I am in the middle of setting up a new space, I now have smart control over the heating system and next I am adding controls for the fans. I will be able to check the state of my grow from my phone anywhere and I should get notifications if things go wrong. I have some old Raspberry Pi Model Bs spare so I am going to setup CCTV. I am going to build my own SIPs to dealing with watering. If I need to make environmental changes I can do that from where ever I am in the world on my phone.

I want to be in a position where I only have to go and check my grow weekly and top up the SIPs.

 

[oill]

we are going to use trolmaster at work and i am so anxious about what you said above, power outages and the programs not running on the same timelines

or communication between A/Cs and dehums and heaters is off and a room get damaged..so much fine tuning with new set ups

Trollmastet stuff is the business... its really good

 

[twentyeight.threefive]

i'm almost always home. i walk in my garden, and feel that it's a little too humid, and i turn up the exhaust fan. i watch the weather, and know when it's going to be especially warm or cold, and deal with it as it happens. i realize some people have to travel, and if they want to automate, then that's their business, but i'm hardly ever gone more than two days at a time, and would rather deal with it hands on

A human hygrometer. Amazing.

 

[Apalchen]

we are going to use trolmaster at work and i am so anxious about what you said above, power outages and the programs not running on the same timelines

or communication between A/Cs and dehums and heaters is off and a room get damaged..so much fine tuning with new set ups

Trolmaster works well I think. I’m still out there all the time to check. But I have it controlling mini splits and anden dehuey, c02 and lights.

It’s nice to have notifications to your phone, let’s me know when to change c02 tanks, too hot or cold, humidity too high or low, power outage, basically stuff I wouldn’t know if I wasn’t in the room. And you might be surprised that if your in the room at the same time every day it might be different at other times and things can be adjusted.

That being said it’s always best to have two sensors I’m gonna order pulse sensors as well.

And of course I’ll still be very hands on but it’s nice having some peace of mind if I’m busy doing something else and can’t go check.

 

[Bishop12]

I use a Raspberry PI to control and monitor parts of my grow tent. Not that I really need to, but I've been learning how to program in Python and I thought it would be a fun pandemic hobby to cobble together a system. Also, sensors for the RPi are shockingly cheap; I have temperature, humidity, CO2, and luminosity senors, as well as a camera, which altogether cost less than $100. It's also able to control the power to the fans, lights, and humidifier. Right now, it collects data every minute and stores it to a cloud-based server, which I can also use to send commands to the RPi. Obviously this is all absolute OVERKILL for a 3x3 home tent, but I've had a blast figuring it all out . I haven't put my code on GitHub, but if anyone is interested I'd be more than happy to share.



Oh, and I can put together fun dashboards with all kinds of bells and whistles!

 

[Bookush34]

I kept my tent simple I think.

lights on timers

Exhaust fan on T-stat (6” duct booster on the same line…keeps a slight exhaust flow 24-7)

humidifier is plumbed into my RO water

I have a 20gal Rez that has a pump on a digital timer. Lines to each plant. 9 minutes to water 4x 5 gal pots.

when I do 3gal hempys. I can go over 10days unattended. Longest I went away was 7days. Pretty cool to see the growth over 7 days! I know most of us visit our grows daily+ So you kinda don’t see how drastic a week can be

 

[speedwell68]

I use a Raspberry PI to control and monitor parts of my grow tent. Not that I really need to, but I've been learning how to program in Python and I thought it would be a fun pandemic hobby to cobble together a system. Also, sensors for the RPi are shockingly cheap; I have temperature, humidity, CO2, and luminosity senors, as well as a camera, which altogether cost less than $100. It's also able to control the power to the fans, lights, and humidifier. Right now, it collects data every minute and stores it to a cloud-based server, which I can also use to send commands to the RPi. Obviously this is all absolute OVERKILL for a 3x3 home tent, but I've had a blast figuring it all out . I haven't put my code on GitHub, but if anyone is interested I'd be more than happy to share.

View attachment 5046552

Oh, and I can put together fun dashboards with all kinds of bells and whistles!
View attachment 5046558

That is awesome. What model RPI are you running? I have various spare ones.

 

[PadawanWarrior]

KISS

Agreed.

 

[lusidghost]

I use a Raspberry PI to control and monitor parts of my grow tent. Not that I really need to, but I've been learning how to program in Python and I thought it would be a fun pandemic hobby to cobble together a system. Also, sensors for the RPi are shockingly cheap; I have temperature, humidity, CO2, and luminosity senors, as well as a camera, which altogether cost less than $100. It's also able to control the power to the fans, lights, and humidifier. Right now, it collects data every minute and stores it to a cloud-based server, which I can also use to send commands to the RPi. Obviously this is all absolute OVERKILL for a 3x3 home tent, but I've had a blast figuring it all out . I haven't put my code on GitHub, but if anyone is interested I'd be more than happy to share.

View attachment 5046552

Oh, and I can put together fun dashboards with all kinds of bells and whistles!
View attachment 5046558

Can you download scripts for different functions instead of coding them yourself?

 

[Bishop12]

That is awesome. What model RPI are you running? I have various spare ones.

It's a Raspberry Pi 4 model B. I had originally started with a RPi Zero W, which works great, but I've been playing around with using Redis to store the sensor data for the dashboard and Redis requires a 64-bit OS.

 

[Bishop12]

Can you download scripts for different functions instead of coding them yourself?

Yes and No. For the sensors (e.g., temperature, humidity, CO2, etc...) there are scripts that you can download and use. But, in order to get everything to play nicely together, coding is required. For example, I found out (the hard way) that it's VERY important that your code consider various fail-safes. Similar to the original post, I experienced a situation last year during one of my first grows, where a power outage caused the Raspberry Pi to reboot, thus ending the routine. Unfortunately, this meant that the lights, humidifier, and fans defaulted to on. There was so much moisture in the grow tent I pretty much had to squeegee down the walls! So, consequently, I had to learn how to include various fail safes-- some just as a simple as making sure the main script boots up if the RPi reboots.