Cloudline AI-CLS6 (S6) PWM control with RPI

Here's few more things

Craggin did I get the right pwm.

Will the. 5ton36volt work or do I need to use the 3bto 20 volt MOSFET I'm useing Arduino mega 2560 plus. To power. I2c / pwm.

I have 5. Cloudline t4s 2 old 3 new ec 1 of them in box unopened ac infinity won't take it back and I have 2 t6 cloudlines. And 4 wifi controller 67 and 2 of there new. AC infinity Controller 76 and a big vivosun AC power inline fan connected to my carbon filter for exhaust. I have quite a few grows around state if michigan
1. 2 room out buildings indoor 2 rooms14x20ft

2. my home inside 4x8 and a 4x4 for my breeding pheno hunting and personal /exotix smoke

3.my newest addition the one I'm working on now trying to proto type a grow room controller that I can test at my home before I use in my big grows that I have my professional system in right now I'm splitting the system to control two 14x20ft rooms. If I can figure this stuff out I can sell my 10k system and put banna pi,orange pi,atomic pi,and adruinos. And. Esp32. I'm making prototype now. But I'm finding out everyone is wrong about raspberry pi 4 being the go to for. Home auto automation. Hass,homekit etc etc . I used one of my orange pi prime and orange pi 4,, and. Atomic pi. Works good too. But there is new product you plug the raspberry pi in like a iot breakout board I'm trying to find it I can the company makes 2 one of them is for rpi other is for esp. 32 and. Esp8

What does everyone think about useing this the ..https://edgedevices.io/.
Or this dual board single board computer called. snickerdoodle raspberry pi crusher. Here is purchase page and info..


Here is the project page for the pi crusher


They also make one for. Esp32 mcu.

wieczorekfloorz said:

Craggin did I get the right pwm.

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If you're referring to the screenshot screenshot_20220102-091749-png, then yes I would say so. Diff brand than I got, but the board/components look the same.

wieczorekfloorz said:

Will the. 5ton36volt work or do I need to use the 3bto 20 volt MOSFET I'm using Arduino mega 2560 plus. To power. I2c / pwm.

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I'm using the 5-30V; works great. I'm powering my Mega with the same 5 V source as I power the Pi. The Mega's PWM outputs can't handle the 10V nor the current used by the CL. You don't need any additional power source/converter to get the 10V source as it's already being provided by the CL itself. I'm also unsure why the other 2 growers installed the MOSFET at the fan itself. The long cable with the molex connector provides the 10V source, a ground and then a PWM return signal path, meaning you can install/mount the MOSFET inside a project box next to the Arduino and have shorter length wires to connect them.

wieczorekfloorz said:

I have 5. Cloudline t4s 2 old 3 new ec 1 of them in box unopened ac infinity won't take it back and I have 2 t6 cloudlines. And 4 wifi controller 67 and 2 of there new. AC infinity Controller 76 and a big vivosun AC power inline fan connected to my carbon filter for exhaust. I have quite a few grows around state if michigan
1. 2 room out buildings indoor 2 rooms14x20ft

2. my home inside 4x8 and a 4x4 for my breeding pheno hunting and personal /exotix smoke

3.my newest addition the one I'm working on now trying to proto type a grow room controller that I can test at my home before I use in my big grows that I have my professional system in right now I'm splitting the system to control two 14x20ft rooms. If I can figure this stuff out I can sell my 10k system and put banna pi,orange pi,atomic pi,and adruinos. And. Esp32. I'm making prototype now. But I'm finding out everyone is wrong about raspberry pi 4 being the go to for. Home auto automation. Hass,homekit etc etc . I used one of my orange pi prime and orange pi 4,, and. Atomic pi. Works good too. But there is new product you plug the raspberry pi in like a iot breakout board I'm trying to find it I can the company makes 2 one of them is for rpi other is for esp. 32 and. Esp8

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Not sure how you formed that conclusion. My first gen design uses an RPi 3B+ which worked great when I had much of the automation baked into the Arduino code. But my new design with the TP-Link module required that I pull all the device automation back into the Pi, which consumed enough resources that I had to make the leap to Pi 4 (4G). But, then again - I'm not using Home Assistant. All of the code in my system I wrote myself with exception of the open-source libraries to build upon.

The pics are from my gen 1 system:


EDIT: Forgot to mention - cute kiddo BTW....

Here's some more trying to get and show everything I got to work with.

I wanna build a whole 4x2ft panel peg board or something to mount it all to where can I get those din boxeses

Do you have a cell I can msg you or Facebook I was gonna video chat. While I hook this up and run it when I out 50% pwm it's like half 0 percent it's full and 100 percent it shuts off?? Nick 5868439790 if you do have cell. Or Facebook msnger. https://m.me/Wieczorekflooring

I've had zero issues basing my setup on RPIs. An rpi4 runs homeassistant and mosquitto mqtt server. PizeroWs connected to some sensors and relays, send data via mqtt to the homeassistant server. The ESP32 boards look suitable as well, but I'm far more comfortable with Linux and Python. So far, has been 100% reliable. Easy to add capabilities as needed. I just finished getting some load cells to trigger fertigation by weight. Not sure its any better than using a timer but the self-adjustment is pretty cool.

I was thinking that pi zeros or pico pi??

I use a zeroW and a zero2W for data gathering/control.
The pico is microcontroller without wifi. I got one to tinker with but haven't used it for anything useful.

https://m.me/Wieczorekflooring. U got fnbook or cell MMS msg. 5868439790

wieczorekfloorz said:

Do you have a cell I can msg you or Facebook I was gonna video chat. While I hook this up and run it when I out 50% pwm it's like half 0 percent it's full and 100 percent it shuts off?? Nick 5868439790 if you do have cell. Or Facebook msnger. https://m.me/Wieczorekflooring

Click to expand...

Just sent you a txt msg from my mobile.

@wieczorekfloorz That's normal operation for the cloudline fan. 100% pwm is full off and 0% is full on. I'm sure they did that so in the event of a disconnected controller it would run at 100% (which I think is definitely a better idea than off).

Kinda surprises that everyone is using big mosfets for pwm signaling, being real cheap price I guess no harm in overkill but I've poked around inside two of the three controllers AC uses and both use a pretty small and unmarked transistor for pwm signal driving. My guess is it's a 2n2222 or something similar, you could probably get away with a PC817 optocoupler directly. I use PC817's directly all the time to drive PWM dimming for meanwell drivers. Works beautifully. I have yet to find the time to test with a Cloudline fan but will soon.
The PC817 has a Vmax of 80V but only a 50mA current max so worst case if you kill a 1$ pc817 put a 35 cent 2n2222 in between the PC817 and the PWM of the fan. The advantage of this is the components are cheap and small enough to dead bug solder and shrink tube them right into the connector cable end your plugging the fan into. Just remember to double fold the wires on each side of the dead bug before you shrink tube for good strain relief.

A heads up for those relying 100% on control from your Pi to do everything. After five years of running node red on a PI I have had 2 SD card failures. After the first one which almost killed everything in my room. I then moved to decentralize control by using tasmota flashed devices. My second card failure the room didn't even notice instead of bringing it to a screeching halt. I still use node-red to monitor the controllers, send me notifications, and set new times/settings but those will be uploaded directly to the tasmota controllers after being entered in node red. I've also found this to reduce the pi's cpu overhead too.

@Lite Brite - That's very useful information. Thanks! My thought on the overkill mosfet is that I could drive other PWM devices that might require more current, all with one circuitry design. And, like you said - since they're cheap, it doesn't matter much.

WRT the PI SD card failure... I assume it's inevitable, but since I switched over to pricey high-quality SD cards, I've had ZERO failures in any of my Pis that are running constantly. Granted, most have not seen a full 5 years of constant use, so I may have to consider your concept at some point.

My 1st gen controller used a similar design, where I had an Arduino Mega "flashed" with it's C++ code, and it ran all the actual automation routines. But, I wanted to support TP-Link Smart Plugs, so I pulled all the automation back into the Pi. That little endeavor has been costly - both time & money - as it required moving from an RPi 3B+ to RPi 4 for extra compute power AND rewriting a bunch of my code. FWIW - I'm a EE & software developer by trade, but moved over to technical sales a while back and this little project helps keep my dev skills fresh - otherwise node red or HASS would have been my route.

The only crop failure I've had in 3+ years was the result of me overtaxing the current capacity of my controller unit and it popped the installed circuit breaker. That's why I added TP-Link capabilities!

@craggin Ah two leaves on the same tree.. I too Was using a full room controller based on the Arduino mega and custom code for many many years. As the first PI became available and mycodos popped up I started experimenting with it running side by side and using mycodos to control some functions on the arduino via USB. About 4 years ago I found Node MCU's, node red, and Sonoff's which lead me to tasmota, which is an amazingly simple yet powerful firmware. You can customize it to do just about anything just through the web based configuration. No coding needed. Just flash, config, and go. Temp sensors, C02, Humidity, thermostat, dimmer/power control it's all possible. Even custom sensor configuration. You can interact with them via PUSH,HTTP,MQTT,GET, Json. Really flexible.

All of my led drivers use sonoffs. Even the 600 watters though I use the remote on/off leads to turn em off/on as I really don't trust such a small device relay to handle that kind of load. I use a sonoff that switches a 5V wall wart connected to a relay opens/closes the remote wires. I could have hacked the sonoff to make it low voltage but this method makes everything stock and easy to replace in event of failure.

As for using the PC817's for dimming. I have at least 3 modules that have been in sevice for over 3 years with no failure. I used to work at a company that had well over 1000 817's in service for over 10 years in a commercial environment with 5 being replaced in that timespan. the Sharp PC817 is a workhorse from hell!

My current node red implementation is on a PI 3B+ running in docker and has plenty of speed to run everything I need since all of the timers n such are offloaded to the tasmota modules. I also run mosquito MQTT and open VPN on the same PI for secure remote access to the network.

On the subject of SD card corruption. I'd replace ur card about every 24 months with a new one, or make the SD read only and offload the settings/saves to a usb stick. or maybe setting up a esp8266 to act as a watchdog and when it doesn't receive a "heartbeat" from the PI it kicks you a txt or something. That way within seconds of failure you're aware of it.

I myself have very little code experience, I knew BASIC when I started messing with arduino. I basically learned C on the fly by using open source code for the arduino from many people and "mashing" it into the will of my controller LOL.
Same for linux, I know enough to be dangerous. This U tuber helped me alot in setting up my current config the installer he references makes setup of docker, portainer(for container management), and current containers for various things pretty painless even for a linux novice such as myself.


Sorry if I hijacked the thread folks. Apologies.

I do plan on implementing the PC817 for cloudline fan control and will report back if it is sustainable by itself or I needed to add the 2n2222 transistor. I'm betting you probably won't be running more than 1 of these per i/o pin on 3.3V devices but on a esp8266 almost every pin can be configured as PWM output so not a real concern for me plus if I need a tasmota module to do other things like trigger other modules (say for PWM on 3 separate fans) you could achieve that with "rules" or compile tasmota yourself and enable the scripting module for adding custom stuff.

Lite Brite said:

@craggin Ah two leaves on the same tree..

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Love it!

Lite Brite said:

@craggin
~~~ Sorry if I hijacked the thread folks. Apologies. ~~~

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No apology needed, we're still talking about RPi and grow room automation.

Now, I'm thinking there's a strong need to learn more about tasmota! Thanks, man!