I ended up being completely swamped with my day job this week, so not a whole lot of progress to report. I received the small linear actuators yesterday, and the 12V aquarium pump today. The 12V/5V open frame power supply is in transit. The remaining parts should be here, hopefully early this week. I'm taking a couple of days off this coming week to give this project my undivided attention so that I can have it at least marginally functional by next weekend. I'm assuming we're going to have to start germinating our seeds sometime in the next week or so. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm goin' with a flat tray and some paper towels to dampen the seeds until they start to germinate, then transfer them to the grow media.
For the database interface, I'm going to be using Python with Django for a REST interface to a mysql backend. Unlike some of the other entrants, I don't forsee my data structures being remotely that complex. I'm goin' for simplicity here.
Since my daughter isn't here this weekend, I'm going to focus on getting the Simplicity studio up and running and coding the basics for the SCADA system. Given the time constraints that I've now left myself with, I'm just going to go bare metal to get the project done, and later I'll play around with a RTOS.