Hello everybody ! Hope everyone is safe.
This past two weekends was finally the time to finish the greenhouse where the magic will happen. The wiring and connections to the Raspberry PI's is finished and will be explained further down.
The beginnings of the greenhouse are started in the third post of this series.
Greenhouse
This is the finished "contraption" to house the hydroponics and all the electronics that goes into controlling it.
The housing is just some aluminum profiles with wood to make it sturdy and be able to fix all the electronics.
Because this is not able to withstand the rain - and I'm in the northern hemisphere, its fall/winter time, it has lights to help the plants grow.
The first set of lights are fixed to the greenhouse and the second set of lights are fixed to the top layer of the hydroponics kit.
I have white lights and red/blue lights, in the ratio 5:1 .
It has been shown that plants not also need red/blue, but also white lights - the full spectrum. It's certain that when growing they need more of one than the other, but when in the vegetative state or fruiting, the need more of the other
It has a tick plastic all around it and the "doors" - front and back - have velcro to allow to "open" and "close" when needed.
The kit already has been tested with water to search for leaks. Everything is fine and no leak was found. There was some problems with the water tube connection, but a bit of plumber tape solved the problem.
Assembly of the hydroponics kit
Here are some pictures of the assembly
Electronics
The electronics are housed above, in a shelf just for them.
We have (from left to right):
- Raspberry PI4b with the Enviro HAT
- Raspberry PI 3B+ with the Automation HAT mini
- 4 channel relay controlled by the Automation HAT mini
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Because the terminals in the Automation HAT mini are so small, some wires would touch each other and strange things would happen, like, after turning the lights on, the air pump would also turn on, etc.., I decided to use the outputs to turn on/off an external relay.
The Automation HAT mini controls everything, but using an external relay and not the outputs directly. The relay of the automation HAT is controlling the Water Pump.
So, here's what each one does:
- RPI 4B 2GB with Enviro HAT
- Temperature
- Pressure
- Humidity
- Luminosity
- SQLITE3 database
- Flask Webservices
- RPI 3B+ with Automation Hat MINI
- Water Pump
- 4 channel relay
- Air Pump
- Red/Blue lights
- White Lights
- RPI Zero W (not in the picture)
- Takes a picture every 10 minutes for a posterior time lapse.
- Uses Webservices from RPI4 to gather environmental data
- Post to twitter 4 times a day with the environmental data and a picture of the hydroponics grow status
Why two lights ? Well, they should have been together, but the 12v power source I was going to use for both does not have enough amps.So, I've split them into two.
The next weekend it's play time. Everything is going to start working - for another post.
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