Grow Room Automation with Home Assistant

shimbob said:

I could never trust my grow to Windows.
"Oh sorry, I couldn't turn the lights on/off as scheduled because I was too busy installing an update"

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Ice Cubez said:

Well no matter how you automate you should always have fail safes and plan for the event of failure. Regardless of what operating system you use.

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Have2 said:

yep... I even have the trolmaster to warn me in case of light alarm but seems the detector doesn't detect IR leds... that is weird...

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2com said:

Probably not. It probably only detects light in the PAR range. Maybe 400-700 or something. I duno.

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Have2 said:

PAR or a certain intensity... I'll investigate a bit maybe add a white bulb just in case it happens again, I'll be warned this way.

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Ice Cubez said:

Well no matter how you automate you should always have fail safes and plan for the event of failure. Regardless of what operating system you use.

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2com said:

I've had one not register the actual ceiling light of a "residential" fixture as being "on" or enough light. Just fyi. (fixture actually has multiple bulbs in it, too.).

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Have2 said:

What is the brand of your smart plugs? I tried tuya and tplink. Issues so far are with the tuya. Maybe I'll replace them all.

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sf_frankie said:

Figured I'd show you guys what I've been working on in my free time. Its a WIP but I'm happy with progress thus far. Previously I was able to remote control and monitor my lights, temperature, humidity and ventilation. It was kind of a pain though because I had to use different apps for each feature. Enter Home Assistant. Home Assistant (HASS/HASSio) is open source home automation software that is damn near infinitely customizable. It has official support for damn near every brand of smart device (and if it doesn't there is unofficial support). You can even flash your smart device with different firmware if you want/need to to make it work. It all runs on a Raspberry Pi 4. The learning curve is pretty steep and requires a little bit of what I would call programming-lite. You need to be comfortable using the command line and you'll need to familiarize yourself with something called YAML. I've always been great with computers but know fuck all about coding/programming. Its been a fun learning experience though!

Right now my main dashboard allows me to remotely switch humidity and lights but there is no need to do so because its all automated by the software. The humidifier and dehumidifier are both hooked up to smart plugs and turn on and off based on the readings from my Govee bluetooth/wifi thermometer and hygrometer from Amazon. The humidity and temp each have their own dashboard card which displays current conditions as well as a historical graph that changes colors based on a range I set on the backend. Using the readings from the Govee, I created a custom card that calculates VPD in real time. There are 2 gagues on the dashboard that I have set up to change color based on the ideal VPD range for the plant cycle (one for veg and one for flower). Red is bad, yellow is OK and green is perfect.

I've also set it up to send me notifications when VPD has been out of range for an extended period of time or if the lights have been on too long or out too long.

I've spent less than $100 on the whole set up including the Pi. I plan to eventually use this system to automate watering and add soil monitoring. The thermostat on my mini split does an excellent job of controlling temps with its built in thermostat but I will likely find a way to add control of it too, eventually.

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sf_frankie said:

I've spent less than $100 on the whole set up including the Pi. I plan to eventually use this system to automate watering and add soil monitoring. The thermostat on my mini split does an excellent job of controlling temps with its built in thermostat but I will likely find a way to add control of it too, eventually.

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GitHub - hristo-atanasov/Tasmota-IRHVAC: Home Assistant platform for controlling IR Air Conditioners via Tasmota IRHVAC command and compatible hardware

Home Assistant platform for controlling IR Air Conditioners via Tasmota IRHVAC command and compatible hardware - hristo-atanasov/Tasmota-IRHVAC

github.com

morbidpete said:

So I made a lot of progress on my own instance of this. would love to compare and see if we can swap ideas, maybe slack or discord or something, I still need to add my feed tank water level sensors, dehu/ro tank sensors and light intensity sensors. I'll be putting what I have so far in place. Have text alerts for high/low temp, humidity, VPD, LVPD and CO2. Also going to add an alert for light during night and no light during day. Running on a K8's cluster and all local so no reliance on internet. Have a separate NodeMCU that pings the HA server and other NodeMCU's to make sure they are up, if not it triggers a constant beep using a pizeo and turns on a red light . Also using an IR sensor for the leaf temp. Printing a rig for it now to hold the IR sensor and intensity sensor to mount to my net poles so I can train it on the leaf as they climb. ignore the settings I actually have set, this is all connected on my workbench and I'm just testing every automation. Not going live until this weekend if it all checks out.

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Have2 said:

What are the humi/temp sensors you are using? I tried one and never been able to get a reading... Dunno if it was the sensor that was defective but well... It's been a long time, maybe I should try again with another one.

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morbidpete said:

Also wanted to point out, I took control of my minisplit using Tasmotair on a node MCU with IR LED's and IR Receivers. This git has a great custom component to make a Climate entity. I placed the IR blaster and receiver inside the control box of my minisplit (Cooper&Hammer) so no interference from HA sending to the AC and if I use the remote, HA will see what I changed it to with the remote and update its own climate control card, so I'm not stuck using just the remote or HA, I can use both and have the states synced via MQTT.

GitHub - hristo-atanasov/Tasmota-IRHVAC: Home Assistant platform for controlling IR Air Conditioners via Tasmota IRHVAC command and compatible hardware

Home Assistant platform for controlling IR Air Conditioners via Tasmota IRHVAC command and compatible hardware - hristo-atanasov/Tasmota-IRHVAC

github.com

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Have2 said:

PAR or a certain intensity... I'll investigate a bit maybe add a white bulb just in case it happens again, I'll be warned this way.

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Arkarius said:

This is cool! I might have to try it out...

I too am in the process of setting up HA to monitor my grow, for now. I'm only on my first so I'd rather not automate TOO much of the process just yet, but visualizing all of the data and trends definitely helps tweaking the setup.

Here's what I've got so far.
One of my next projects will be building a rbpi with some sensors for tracking EC/PH and auto-dosing PH.

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Arkarius said:

I don't run HA on a rbpi, that would be just for sending the sensor data back. HA runs in my k8s cluster.

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MidnightSun72 said:

I talked to the trolmaster engineers. They said it was a certain intensity.

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morbidpete said:

I like those graphs. What card is that? Would like to add those to my bar graph page. As for auto dosing. That is my next step once I am 100% on the environment setup. Plan to use PH dosing along side a concentrated tank of Jacks A,B and Epson for auto mixing. I already have the solenoids and flow meter for auto making tanks. plan is to monitor water level in the tank and when empty to auto fill and dose as needed. I built a similar system years ago ( cant remember the name of the nutes but it was 7 parts and a pain in the ass) using just an Arduino mega, some some pumps and a 4x26 screen. worked well.

As for the PI, they are great fro HA to dedicate to this but wil wear out your SD card very fast! even setting filters on the recorder it will wear out. Make sure to set your pi to USB boot and use an SSD on USB3 and use the google drive snapshots plug in to get back up and running ASAP if needed. I dev on a pi3 then move production to my K8's cluster so a PI can die if it wants but the system wont go down.

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