Fully automated hydroponics

devinrayolsen

New Member
I've spent the past year learning everything I could about traditional and vertical hydroponic farming, such as:

  • Nutrient dosing / drifting amounts over growth stages
  • pH ranges / drifting and micro adjusting
  • Full nutrient feedings vs. top off feedings
  • Concentrate levels between feeding types
  • EC or PPM ranges and what causes drifting
  • Irrigation and light cycles

From here I learned a great deal about C++ and Arduinos, and began to quantify all the steps a system would need to build an automated hydroponics OS for farmers. After some time, I've finally finished building both the physical box and OS, while simultaneously capturing it all on video for others.

[video=youtube;GlZHTMk3PBg]
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My hope is that by both automating hydroponics, and open sourcing my project / OS others will build too, and more farmers will start to see vertical farming as simple, not hard. The more vertical farming we can do, the less actual land we use up for agriculture, and that is good for everyone!

One of the key features I wanted my project (and others who build) to have, was a way for people to share successful "crop" configuration online as a community. So I made the system be built around a micro SD card reader (required) for that exact reason, and plan to construct an online site where you can upload / download different food type configurations for everyone around the world to use.
 
Peristaltic pumps that drip, 10 pumps total.
3 pumps/bottles reserved for automatic micro pH adjustments to both reservoir and plant water.
1 pump is a constant pH direction for incoming RO water (user determines), other 2 for up or down to micro adjusting to plants water realtime. This leaves you with 7 bottles for nutes and amendments.

I already tried going down the route of doing actuators, was not worth the time, size or cost :)
[video=youtube;vrFCVSegT5M]
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Sorry, I had a glitch happen, all I could see was the title and no comments yet, might have been 420. Then after I hit send, and went to the main thread feed, I could see your heading, and realized my comment was out of context, sorry again!
 
Yes, system is not time based but "regimen"/event based, so you have a much lower chance of tossing out potentially good nutes (like you can/will do with time based systems).

Solution amounts get configured in (per pump) as ml amounts, over X amount of configured regimens. So indeed amounts per solution can drift (as configured) over the life time of plants.

Both automated pH adjustments and pump doses have configurable delays. As each solution/pH adjustment is performed, X amount of configured delay time will pass before proceeding with next dose and ensures no nute lockout. pH adjustments take priority over nutrient dosing or plant water topping off; this is to ensure a pH is always within range under all circumstances.

So, it's here that you get to configure your reservoir volume size (starts at 36m00s):
DIY Automatic Hydroponic Doser #2 - YouTube

Then here you enter your amounts in.
You don't have to do "amount*gallons" math anymore, cause system already knows your volume of water and does that for you now (starts at 42m28s):
DIY Automatic Hydroponic Doser #2 - YouTube

Happy to answer any and all questions!
 
Last post was suppose to take you to the exact point in time on the video.
Not sure why it keeps setting both videos to the last videos time :) but yeah you get the idea heh.
 
The idea is fascinating. Automated hydroponics... All in all I think it's great but I prefer the old adage: The best thing for a garden is the shadow of a Gardener.

I hope the farmer recognizes hydroponics as a means to produce. That would open so many doors.
 
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