GandalfGreen's 420 Carat Soil Grow - LED - Monitored With Raspberry Pi

[GandalfGreen]

So it's been a while since I popped my head in here so I thought I'd stop by and let you guys know the progress.
I've been on a holiday for about a week and had my brother take care of my plants again. I asked him to only give them pH'ed water this time because I wanted to see how the girls would respond and because I didn't want to overfeed them. But when I came back, just a tiny amount of leaves started to show some yellow/brownish discoloration and I'm not sure what it is exactly. Could be because the pH wasn't within the right range, or it could be that they're showing signs of a deficiency.
When I first fed them again I made sure to give them 2.0 mS of feed at 6.3 pH and I'll have to see how they respond. But it's nothing serious since the buds are getting really nice and fat. On some of them the pistils are turning orange even which looks really cool. Not sure what it means but by the smell of it it's something good :')

Could anyone chip in and give me their piece of mind on what you think this is?

 

[Buckshot317]

Maybe just add touch if calmag to your feedings. I have a couple leafs doing same thing, but I'm using organic food and soil. I'm just gonna leave mine alone, I'm not too worried if only couple leaves.

Your girls look good....

 

[GandalfGreen]

So it seems that my girls are nearing harvest time after 65 days of flowering. As an experiment I took one branch that looked ready through my loupe and am now drying it to see how 'ready' it really is! My entire house smelled like a greenhouse for about a day after, hmm!

Some plants look more ready than others. For example the biggest colas still have a lot of white pistils on them with some of then turning orange while the pistils on the smaller shoots have already fully turned orange. I'm not sure what the change in color means in terms of quality but it looks really cool! Anyone got any good information about this process? I'm eager to learn!

I've noticed some smell leaking out of the tent in my garage which isn't too noticeable when you're standing outside but it's still there. I've got a carbon filter installed but still the smell seeps through. So perhaps it's time to change the filter for the next grow or grow something that doesn't smell that awesome... I know what I'd choose xD

A little something I noticed the other day is that on my biggest colas there's a white tip forming. It's quite a small area but I'm thinking this might be discoloration because of the light since the colas are so close to the lamps? But then again they're LED's and there's enough space to not overheat the plants. I read this article the other day about it possibly being like a mountain of THC sitting on top of the buds. Let's wait and see I think, not too long now!

Oh and some hype pictures to top it off for you guys!

 

[Phototropic]

So it seems that my girls are nearing harvest time after 65 days of flowering. As an experiment I took one branch that looked ready through my loupe and am now drying it to see how 'ready' it really is! My entire house smelled like a greenhouse for about a day after, hmm!

Some plants look more ready than others. For example the biggest colas still have a lot of white pistils on them with some of then turning orange while the pistils on the smaller shoots have already fully turned orange. I'm not sure what the change in color means in terms of quality but it looks really cool! Anyone got any good information about this process? I'm eager to learn!

I've noticed some smell leaking out of the tent in my garage which isn't too noticeable when you're standing outside but it's still there. I've got a carbon filter installed but still the smell seeps through. So perhaps it's time to change the filter for the next grow or grow something that doesn't smell that awesome... I know what I'd choose xD

A little something I noticed the other day is that on my biggest colas there's a white tip forming. It's quite a small area but I'm thinking this might be discoloration because of the light since the colas are so close to the lamps? But then again they're LED's and there's enough space to not overheat the plants. I read this article the other day about it possibly being like a mountain of THC sitting on top of the buds. Let's wait and see I think, not too long now!

Oh and some hype pictures to top it off for you guys!

Tastey looking buds.

I don't know much about LED because i haven't invested yet but from what i understand, with LEDs it's not the heat that will burn when close, it's the amount of light pouring down that can burn. How far are your lights?

 

[Phototropic]

So it's been a while since I popped my head in here so I thought I'd stop by and let you guys know the progress.
I've been on a holiday for about a week and had my brother take care of my plants again. I asked him to only give them pH'ed water this time because I wanted to see how the girls would respond and because I didn't want to overfeed them. But when I came back, just a tiny amount of leaves started to show some yellow/brownish discoloration and I'm not sure what it is exactly. Could be because the pH wasn't within the right range, or it could be that they're showing signs of a deficiency.
When I first fed them again I made sure to give them 2.0 mS of feed at 6.3 pH and I'll have to see how they respond. But it's nothing serious since the buds are getting really nice and fat. On some of them the pistils are turning orange even which looks really cool. Not sure what it means but by the smell of it it's something good :')

Could anyone chip in and give me their piece of mind on what you think this is?

Looks kind of like this to me

Check this site. Great for info.
Plant Doctor - Diagnose Your Plants! | Grow Weed Easy

 

[GandalfGreen]

Uh-oh. I need your help! 2 of my biggest cola's are not looking good at all. I noticed it starting about a week ago when the biggest cola started... drying out? The sugar leaves turned brown and the bud itself started turning brown-ish as well.
My first though was maybe overfeeding? I've been bumping up the mS/PPM for a while now and my last feed was at 2.2 mS (~1500PPM). But then I started researching online and the only link I was able to make is bud rot. ;(

Could anyone take a look at these pictures and tell me what they think it is?

 

[GandalfGreen]

After doing some research and asking around in the forums I found out that it was the dreaded bud rot. It had already spread to 3 colas by the time I found out and yesterday I took the initiative to cut down the infected parts of the plant.
As I cut them down I could see white 'fluff' that hopes up between the bud. I could also smell this awfull stench that came of those parts of the plant. Those two things signified for me that it was indeed bud rot and that I'd done the right thing for cutting them down.
Like a cruel joke it manifested on the biggest buds of the plants

To make sure that it wouldn't happen again I checked my temperature and humidity over the last period (yay raspberry pi!) and found that during lights out the temperatures dropped below 20c which is an ideal breeding ground for bud rot apparently. In response I put my heater inside the tent to warm things up while the lights are off. I also upped the speed on the extraction ventilator and I pointed my monkey fan towards the bigger buds to keep air moving between them.

All I can do now is be vigilant and hope for the best. Luckily the rest of the plants looks very healthy and is nearing harvest time.

 

[Gehg]

Sorry to hear about your bud rot G! I had that on a couple of autos I did a while back! Ruined about 2z's of bud! I'm gonna order a raspberry Pi today and get cracking, it's a great idea!! what operating system you running on there?

 

[GandalfGreen]

Sorry to hear about your bud rot G! I had that on a couple of autos I did a while back! Ruined about 2z's of bud! I'm gonna order a raspberry Pi today and get cracking, it's a great idea!! what operating system you running on there?

Shit happens, we live and we learn.
For my Raspberry Pi I'm running the standard raspbian OS, I think I'm on the jessie release of it. But I figure it'd work with most of the lightweight linux distros as long as you can get your runtime installed on it. .

 

[Gehg]

Wicked thanks! I'm gonna try and find a ph probe for my res! If I find a nice cheap one I'll fire it your way!

 

[Gehg]

Ha just seen you're in soil! My bad!

 

[GandalfGreen]

Ha just seen you're in soil! My bad!

No problem. If you need the source code to what I made for the raspi just let me know and I'll pass it your way!

 

[Gehg]

Brilliant thank you!

 

[Gehg]

I want to mount a touch screen just outside my room so I can monitor on lights out! It would be cool to wire in a small warning led near the door as a quick reference. Led goes on when environment goes out of set parameters!
How long you reckon you got until harvest?

 

[GandalfGreen]

I want to mount a touch screen just outside my room so I can monitor on lights out! It would be cool to wire in a small warning led near the door as a quick reference. Led goes on when environment goes out of set parameters!
How long you reckon you got until harvest?

Yeah that was my first idea as a setup as well. Some monitoring on when things have gone outside the 'perfect' zone so to speak. I've only gotten to the part where I'm measuring the temp/humidity and plotting it over time so far, no alarms or anything for the rest.

I think that it's about a week left for it to finish off. One of my plants is going a bit slower than the other two so I think I'll have to harvest in two times but that's fine.

Other than that, I've been keeping a close watch over my plants every day inspecting for any more signs of bud rot. So far each day I've had to cut of small parts of my plants that started to rot as well, so I'll have to keep vigilant about it. Overall though I'm very happy with how everything is looking. The smell is so damn pungent and there's so much trichomes on the plants that they shine in the light which is a beauty to behold. The stickiness of the plants is so much that the last few days when I've been checking on the girls I've had to take a long shower to get rid of the smell and even after a very thorough wash I couldn't get rid of the smell on my hands.
A week or so ago I harvested just one little twig and dried it. I'm trying it tonight so I'll let you guys know how that goes

 

[Gehg]

Yeah that was my first idea as a setup as well. Some monitoring on when things have gone outside the 'perfect' zone so to speak. I've only gotten to the part where I'm measuring the temp/humidity and plotting it over time so far, no alarms or anything for the rest.

I think that it's about a week left for it to finish off. One of my plants is going a bit slower than the other two so I think I'll have to harvest in two times but that's fine.

Other than that, I've been keeping a close watch over my plants every day inspecting for any more signs of bud rot. So far each day I've had to cut of small parts of my plants that started to rot as well, so I'll have to keep vigilant about it. Overall though I'm very happy with how everything is looking. The smell is so damn pungent and there's so much trichomes on the plants that they shine in the light which is a beauty to behold. The stickiness of the plants is so much that the last few days when I've been checking on the girls I've had to take a long shower to get rid of the smell and even after a very thorough wash I couldn't get rid of the smell on my hands.
A week or so ago I harvested just one little twig and dried it. I'm trying it tonight so I'll let you guys know how that goes

Hopefully that's the last of the dreaded rot!!

Staggered harvest is cool! Maybe its because I haven't done enough of it yet but I love the harvesting process so twice in as many weeks is satisfying!
I wonder how much you're going to have to wash for to get rid of the harvest stank!!

You using a vape or gonna roll a joint?

 

[GandalfGreen]

Hopefully that's the last of the dreaded rot!!

Staggered harvest is cool! Maybe its because I haven't done enough of it yet but I love the harvesting process so twice in as many weeks is satisfying!
I wonder how much you're going to have to wash for to get rid of the harvest stank!!

You using a vape or gonna roll a joint?

I usually start with a joint but I've got a Volcano vape so I'm definitely trying it out in that as well.

 

[Gehg]

What up G! hope you're well. ..I was wondering if you would mind firing over the code for your sensor? Also how did you wire it in? I think I'm going to get a breakout board so I don't short anything else on the board which trying to attach things to the GPIO.

Peace

 

[GandalfGreen]

What up G! hope you’re well. ..I was wondering if you would mind firing over the code for your sensor? Also how did you wire it in? I think I’m going to get a breakout board so I don’t short anything else on the board which trying to attach things to the GPIO.

Peace

No problemo! Here you go. Not sure how familiar you are with Ruby but I made it into a Ruby on Rails project. I could find some drivers and a library for the exact sensor I used so maybe you can copy that into your own project. I'm sure there's a library for Python as well if that's what you prefer.
I wired my sensor directly onto the Raspberry Pi itself but I guess a breakout board would work just as well.

 

[GandalfGreen]

On another note, I tried the small 'trial' branch that I cut off and hot damn, that is some strong indica! It was still a bit wet cause I didn't take the time to do a proper dry/cure. So it will probably get even better when I harvest the girls and do it properly this time. My plan is to do a harvest of 2/3 of the plants this weekend. The other one needs a bit longer as it has still some white pistils on it that need to turn orange like on the rest of the plants.