DIY Automatic hydro Grow

Nice, when I first saw this I was thinking this was another idea that never be completed. Now I believe! This is going to kick ass man gl!

Although I'm not a network guy I do have a similar cabinet and can tell you from experience that the 50cfm exhaust fan won't be enough. My cabinet is roughly the same size and I put in a 90cfm bathroom exhaust fan. The intakes were two 4" dryer vents. It got hot as hell in there....so much so that I installed a hi-temp emergency cut-out (for the HID fixture) just in case the fan failed. Wouldn't want the house to catch fire if the fan failed. I ended up buying a 450cfm fan and installing a tee with adjustable dampers on the outlet of the fan. About 1/2 the air goes to my flower area (outside the cabinet) and the other half is ducted through the side of the veg cabinet and right through the light, exhausting out the other side. I still run the small fan inside the cabinet to reduce radiant heat.

https://www.rollitup.org/grow-journals/54294-papaya-hindu-kush-aerotub-journal.html

I vent directly outside through a window and leave my doors open most of time. I have plans on getting more exhaust when I get so more $. It's kind of show string budget grow room and I am learning as I go. This is also my first HID grow, I've does CFL for 2 years and grown outside. Thanks for the input

toolage said:

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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Hmm I hadn't planed on archiving all the data and footage but it would be kinda cool. I'll start playing around with that. Thanx

Complicated much... Love to see if you can pull it all off... =]

I took a little basic in school but i am sure i do not remember much... I really hated it though... Such a clunky and non versatile language... =[

I actually maybe (most likely) moving away from the basic idea and just going to use C, I have some experience with C but not enough to really help with this project so I'm going to have to do so studing.

Check out the uC Hobby and Acacia links I posted on page two. Both have example C code or libraries.

It seems flashing router or other network devices equipped with a GPIO is a popular option for these kinds of projects. That might be worth considering, although you've already made good progress on the hardware side!

rolln1up said:

I actually maybe (most likely) moving away from the basic idea and just going to use C, I have some experience with C but not enough to really help with this project so I'm going to have to do so studing.

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are you sure you have to start from scratch? Why not modify already existing code for home automation?

At any rate, using C seems like overkill, unless you want to write a little driver/library so you can control your custom hardware from the terminal or from scripting environments. Doing that is way beyond me. I don't use C, malloc scares me. Of course, I don't really program much at all.

Edit: again, if you can stand to use standard hardware interface libraries, it seems like all that is needed is ioport.h / ioport.c (what JAuto used), which has also been ported to Python (a lot easier to work with than C):

ioport - I/O Hardware port extension for Python

I feel like this might also come in handy, although like of a lot of TLDP stuff it's kind of out of date:

Linux I/O port programming mini-HOWTO

Maccabee said:

At any rate, using C seems like overkill, unless you want to write a little driver/library so you can control your custom hardware from the terminal or from scripting environments. Doing that is way beyond me. I don't use C, malloc scares me. Of course, I don't really program much at all.

Edit: again, if you can stand to use standard hardware interface libraries, it seems like all that is needed is ioport.h / ioport.c (what JAuto used), which has also been ported to Python (a lot easier to work with than C):

ioport - I/O Hardware port extension for Python

I feel like this might also come in handy, although like of a lot of TLDP stuff it's kind of out of date:

Linux I/O port programming mini-HOWTO

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Thanks I'm really more of a hardware man my software skills are lacking, but thats part of my motivation to increase my skill level. I would love to just modify an existing program as I hate coding. Thanks for the link I'll give them a look over

Maccabee said:

It seems flashing router or other network devices equipped with a GPIO is a popular option for these kinds of projects.

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I've already gotten the ability to control the I/O pins on the parallel port which means less that I have to buy but I will keep those in mind as.

Maccabee said:

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

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This looks awsome but when I try and run it I get a message Error loading ./jauto.ini and Eroor loading ioPortT libary not sure whats causing NE1

OKay I was able to get it working. It awsome Maccabee major reps for u I would have never found that. I'm not sure why it started I just came back today and it started working.

Okay here are the reasons I was getting the problems, both stem from faults in the ReadMe

Error loading ioPortT libary: Libary if the ioPort file installed in wrong directory. Need to be in java directory as well as working directory

Error loading ./jauto.ini: Simply creat a blank file in the working directory with this name.

rolln1up said:

Okay here are the reasons I was getting the problems, both stem from faults in the ReadMe

Error loading ioPortT libary: Libary if the ioPort file installed in wrong directory. Need to be in java directory as well as working directory

Error loading ./jauto.ini: Simply creat a blank file in the working directory with this name.

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Cool. Yeah, I had to tinker for a minute to get it to run. Looks promising, eh? GPL'd and everything.

Not really an update on automation system. It will be a week before I have the money to build a relay switching board and wire up some wall sockets in box, but I felt like posting a pic of the grow room I'm automating on day 1 of flowering. Oh I did set up an apache web server so I can use a browser to check in on my plants. I used .htpasswd and .htacess file to secure it with a password login. I have a picture set to reload every 10 sec with a new pic. Wish I could show it off but it just to big of security risk, but here are some pics for everyone.

Nice work! Glad to hear it's coming along.

What systems are you going to automate again... ??

well, this is actually looking good. the first ive seen. if you can make this work share please.

nice looking grow. one word of caution - .htaccess is by far the easiest "by password" authentication to break on the webserver - if you are going to stick with it - at least serve everything under SSL.

if you need help setting up - let me know as it can be tricky (lots of package dependencies unless you got the SSL version of Apache - which is spotty anyway).