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

GandalfGreen

Active Member
Hey again everyone! I loved doing my last grow and was overwhelmed with positive responses (people enjoy free weed, who would've thought!? :thedoubletake:).
Almost a year after completing my first grow I haven't run out yet, but my fingers are tingling again to dive right back into growing. That's why I decided to start my 2nd grow and take with me all the learnings of the first one.

There's a few differences this time around, I'll sum up what I'm working with in a second but let's start at the major changes.
After I've completed my first grow I re-purposed the room I grew in and have now set up shop in my garage. Before I started doing so I measured temperatures/humidity during the day and night to see if it was a good enough to start growing in. I noticed that at night the temperatures dropped to around 12 degrees Celsius (~53F) even with the lights on. That just couldn't do because I don't want to stunt the growth in any way and bought an oil heater to get it through the cold periods during the night.

Something I'm particularly excited for this time around is the fact that I'm going to place a Raspberry Pi with a temperature/humidity sensor and a webcam inside my grow tent. The idea is that I can monitor the plants from anywhere (yay, interwebz!), and see overtime if I need to do anything to adjust temperatures/humidity. I'm a software engineer myself so I'm going to try and write the software myself as much as I can and will open source it so everyone can use it. I've adopted this idea from a post I came across on Reddit.
As soon as I got this set up I will update this thread with some picture goodies! :cheer:

Now, on to the details!

Grow environment:
Secret Jardin DR120 (1.20m x 1.20m x 2m) grow tent

Lights:
Mars Hydro Reflector 192 LED panel (420W@110v; 410W@220v, PAR of 1200umol at 18 inch)

Tools:
- CO2 5 liter tank with regulator and CO2 meter (aiming for about 1500PPM)
- Lux meter
- pH meter
- EC meter
- Temperature & hygrometer

Bucket Size:
The idea is to transplant from a 1 gallon pot to 5 gallon smart pot.
- 4 x 19 liter (5 gallon) smart pot
- 4 x 3.6 liter (1 gallon) plastic pot with four holes in the bottom for drainage.

Medium:
BioBizz All-Mix

Ventilation:
- RUCK R125L ventilator (max. capacity = 370m3/hour)
- Carbonfilter
- Small monkeyfan for inside the tent to strengthen the stem.

Nutrients:
- DutchPro Grow (soil) A+B, 5 liter
- DutchPro Bloom (soil) A+B, 5 liter
- BN Ca Calcium 15%, 1 liter
- BN MgO Magnesium, 1 liter
- Canna PH- Pro Bloom, 1 liter
- Canna PH- Pro Groei, 1 liter
- Canna PH+ 5%, 1 liter

Strains:
- 420 Carat Feminized x 4

Progress so far:
About a week ago I've germinated the 4 seeds in a damp towel and kept them in a dark place for a few days. After about 3 days all of the seeds had sprouted so I went ahead and planted them in a 1 gallon plastic pot and watered them. About 2 days later the first plant breached the surface and reached towards the light! A day or so later the 2 others followed suit. Thusfar there's one seed that did sprout but didn't manage to see the light yet. This might still change though so I'm not giving up on it yet.

Here's some pictures of my current setup:
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Just a quick update. So far it's still 3 out of the 4 that I planted that have sprouted and I'm retiring the other pot since I don't believe it'll still come through. ;(
For the rest of them I set the monkey fan on the lowest setting to get some air moving between the leaves so they can grow stronger!

This week I also managed to set up all the sensors on the Raspberry Pi. I now have a working temperature/humidity sensor and a camera attached to it, and later this week I'll start writing some software to get it into a viewable format so I can share it with you guys.

Happy growing!
 
I've done it! I've bent the Raspberry Pi to my will and made it monitor temp./humidity as well as have a LIVE stream of my plants! I'm thinking on adding some new features to the software such as taking a picture on an interval, storing it somewhere so that at the end of my grows I can make an awesome timelapse.


Less talking, more action, so here's a shot of the temp./humidity monitor in action:
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And here's the Raspberry Pi setup in my tent. I've still to find a sweet spot for it to sit at to get some good pictures & measurements.
2017-06-06_22_08_32.jpg
 
So we're about on day ~20 of the vegetative state and they're looking and smelling so yummy already! :cheer: I've topped the plants once when the 5th set of leaves was coming through and I've transplanted them into 5 gallon smart pots where they're growing very happily. I haven't done any LST whatsoever so they're starting to look pretty bushy already. I'm thinking of topping them a second time but haven't decided whether that's a good idea yet.
My goal is to put them under a scrog but on my last attempt my plants got so huge during the stretch that I couldn't guide them in the right direction because of their massive size.
I made a couple pictures to show how they're doing, let me know what you think!

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Hello! Is there anybody out there? Or is it just crazy me talking my crazy self? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated since this is just my second grow as well and I feel like there's a lot to be learned from the people on here.
Anywho it's been 42 days since planting the seeds and my god how my (hopefully) girls have grown. :cheer: The fan leaves are getting a lot bigger than my previous grow and so far they look perfectly healthy. No deficiencies or toxicity, leaves falling off or anything of the sorts that happened during my last grow.
I decided not to top the plants a second time because it feels like I've got more than enough budding sites for when they go into flower. Yesterday I gave them their first feeding of DutchPro Grow A+B solution at 1.1 mS and with the runoff PH being 6.1. DutchPro advertises to feed them with around 1.5 mS but I decided to dial it down a little bit the first time to see how they react. If they react well I'll up the dosage to 1.5 mS.

Here's some pictures I took a few days ago before the feed:

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Great thread! Glad I followed Shiggity here! I love seeing more tech get used for data logging. It's really going to help future growers with starting on the right foot!
 
I'm subbed, I've had a arduino sitting on the work/dream/project bench for a year, now's the time:thumb::Namaste:
 
I need to learn the temp probe arduino functions and arduino itself. I desperately want to make an auto temperature pwm dimming function. Something that would dim the lights by a set amount at different set temperatures.

For example 10% dimming at 82 25% at 84 and 50% at 86F. You could change the set temperatures and the dimming amounts. I had wrongly thought the arduino based hurricaneX had that function. But it seems existing aquarium temperature probes are just that...temperature probes. It's a missed opportunity.

Imagine your exhaust fan dies. You could have your temp sensor arduino unit dim the tent so instead of coming back to brown cooked plants you come
back to a dim tent. It could save a grower thousands of dollars.
 
Woot, looks like the party's getting started in here! I brought cheese and cake so grab a plate and join the hype-train! :cheer:

A fantastic idea for a thread man. I am just now feeling the need to learn arduino and raspberry pi. Why look for products that never really do what I want? I need to be able to program them to do exactly what I need! Gonna promote you in my thread.

That's just how I felt haha! Luckily I've got a strong background in computer science and I had a raspberry pi lying around so I thought what the heck. I'm a complete noob when it comes to electrical engineering though so I learned a thing or two (and fucked up more than I care to admit lol) while getting this ready.

Great thread! Glad I followed Shiggity here! I love seeing more tech get used for data logging. It's really going to help future growers with starting on the right foot!

Thanks man! The idea was to automate the grow bit by bit to see how far I can push it. First step, data gathering/plotting the conditions. Then I used the camera to get a live stream going so I could watch them from a distance. And I'm now working on getting an automated timelapse function going so I can post some awesome video's after the grow is done. Don't think I'll be able to do that for this grow though, but maybe for the next one :)

Subbed up, would really like to get a look at the code you wrote!

Awesome! I'll be sure to open-sauce it soon so you can have a look. The setup is pretty simple, I've written a Ruby on Rails application that uses the libraries needed to read the temp/humidity sensors. Then I'm using Sidekiq to fire a 'take measurement' job on a cron schedule. The job simply reads the values and inserts it into an InfluxDB instance. Then I've set up Grafana on the raspberry pi to make the readings into a dashboard with some pretty graphs/actionables. I'm wanting to set it up so that I get alerts if the temp/humidity levels are too high/low.
 
Awesome! I'll be sure to open-sauce it soon so you can have a look. The setup is pretty simple, I've written a Ruby on Rails application that uses the libraries needed to read the temp/humidity sensors. Then I'm using Sidekiq to fire a 'take measurement' job on a cron schedule. The job simply reads the values and inserts it into an InfluxDB instance. Then I've set up Grafana on the raspberry pi to make the readings into a dashboard with some pretty graphs/actionables. I'm wanting to set it up so that I get alerts if the temp/humidity levels are too high/low.

Looks like I have some research to do because most of that wasn't English lol. I'm a complete noob when comes to coding. I've read up on it a bit, because the idea of automating my grow would be brilliant but I have zero knowledge on how to put it together. This'll have to be my opportunity to tackle something new. .
 
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