Raspberry pi controlled grow room

Hello everyone.
I decided to make the transition to LED's some time back, but unfortunately life got in the way. Personally, I have not grown for well over 5 years. I had a set up with 3 600w HPS globes which really struggled to produce quality in the Australian summer. So I switched to LED's hoping that I could reduce the heat a little, or at least spread it over the canopy to limit impact. Unfortunately, life happened and I never got to set up the lights.

That was then, and this is now. I have a little better grow location which should be a fair bit cooler too.

So I ordered the following panels and strips back then, and to tell the truth I cant even remember what my thought pattern was when I bought them. I presume I did minimal research and just pulled the trigger

5 x 240w panels each with LM301H LED's. A mix of 144 x 4000K and 144 x 3000K distributed on each board for an average of 3500K
2 x 20w Strip 11 x LG UV 395nm LED's (not sure if these will even do anything! Comments welcome)
4 x 20x Strip XP-E2 660nm + 730nm LED's (mainly for a little extra red in flowering.)

Yesterday I decided I should finally make a move and get it all working. My old system was an "ebb and grow" system on a small PLC. I preferred my system as I controlled the pumps with software which meant it was quite easy to eliminate the pumps bouncing off the floats constantly. A signal from the float disabled the pump for 3 minutes until the system settled.

But now I have a heap of LED's to control, so I spent the better part of the day playing with a raspberry pi and a relay board. I am really happy with what I have achieved so wanted to share.

I created a simple little web based interface. I can log into my network via VPN (or if I am at home on my network) and simply adjust some settings. This will be great as I am a remote worker so if I decide to switch the light cycle a week before I get home I can.
Upon hitting submit, the settings are written in JSON format to the SD card (when I am finished I will get a couple of SD cards and clone the whole lot across so I have backups in the SD fails).
When the python script is run, it loads the settings from the JSON file.
It activates the relays for the main lights, UV lights, and Red's seperately (if it is in a lights on period).
I have also thrown in the flood and drain (Ebb and flow) pumps for good measure.

Here is a screen capture of the quick and dirty interface I made!
Private address range, but I masked it anyways.
The times are just an example but interested to know anyones thoughts. I was just trying to mimic the days change a little.


When you click submit, it writes to the JSON file, then reloads and reads from the JSON file. That way, when you open the page you will always see what the current configuration is.
Eventually, I will add "light profiles" so I can just click "veg" "sativa flower" "indica flower" "hybrid flower" and it will select the times for me.

Once the python script is running, every day at 00:01 it will read the JSON file again and load the variables. So you only have to make a change and at the next "dawn" the new lighting or feeding schedule is loaded. Oh, and I love ebb and flow, but you can easily swap the pumps and turn it into a ebb and flow DWC. So it will keep the DWC pots full and drain and refill them according to the schedule. Set to 24hour frequency and 1 hour drain time should be enough to drain and refill once a day from the resivour.

I don't have the times nutted out yet but the 3400K pannels may be split over two relays that start 10 seconds appart, or they will just start off the one relay.
Also, the flood pump cuts out as soon as it hits the float of the control bucket. 2 minutes later if the float is no longer made it will go again. I find this is needed as the control bucket fills up before the pots. And of course when the system is draining the control bucket drains first, so when the bottom float is made, the drain pump stops for a couple of minutes before trying again.

And here is the output from the CLI that shows things cutting in/out if anyone is interested. Obviously I changed the times to get everything to work quicker so I could capture the output. I have the relay board sitting next to me without everything connected so I am just watching the relays flick on/off and using a wire to jump the pins to simulate the float switches.


One issue I my have, is during a power outage. The RPI gets its time over NTP when it boots. If the network is unavailable then the pi will get stuck in a time worp and end up in 1999 or something. Not a big issue because when the network comes back it will hit the NTP server and come back to reality, but when I go completely black here it can take up to 20 minutes to reconnect when the power comes back up. I dont want that to be in the middle of the dark period and it thinks its supposed to be light!

But that is super rare event here, and it also has to happen in the dark. I could always install a real time clock.

Anyway, just wanted to share where I am going with my set up, and I welcome any comments or criticisms because they will only help me build a better system. Particularly interested in ideas on when to run red/uv and if it is worth it.
Regards,

So reading up a little after I posted this there was a few things I note:
Kind of need the 730nm by themselves to "put the girls to bed" (End of day affect) where as my red strips are 730/660 "Emerson effect" strips. So there may not be any benefit in running them 15m after lights out.
I might order a couple of 730nm only strips in the future for this.

Some people recommend no more than 15m at a time UV. Like pulse it on/off during the day. So I might change the controller to be much like the flood/drain controller. Have a frequency and duration to turn the UV LED's on/off through the grow.

As always, comments are welcome. How would you do it? Or would you leave them out all together?

If you have spare emerson strips.. you can block off the 660. (I used duct tape) Don't have to worry about heat building up since it's only on for minutes. You'll only need to convert one of the strips to cover a pretty large area.

I really like your Raspi setup. The possibilities are endless, you can connect sensors, and then also control the extraction fan with the Raspi. There are lots of sensors useful for horticulture available for the Raspi, including stuff like CO2 sensors, light, temperature, humidity etc.

Since this is hydro you can even attach a pH meter and and EC meter.

The benefits of UV are not clear. You should run an experiment if there are visible benefits. Since you have multiples of the light strips you could run two separate grows to compare.

Same with the end-of-day effect. I would run two grows with clones in parallel to see if the far red actually accelerates flowering. I've read that pure far-red (in darkness) does nothing, but it is the ratio of red:far-red that counts. Good point by @magnetik of duct-taping the 660s (you can leave a few open).

Maybe also lower the timespans when you run red light, as it causes a lot of stretching.

In your screenshot it shows a 25-minute flood phase. That seems awfully long to me.

So cool! I've been running temp/humidity/co2/camera sensors and a relay to control humidity on my RPI. Although I run my own scripts, I've been recently thinking about switching to Mycodo: https://kizniche.github.io/Mycodo/. It's a great opensource project that has a lot of pre-built controls-- including a PID to dial-in climate settings like humidity.

Bishop12 said:

So cool! I've been running temp/humidity/co2/camera sensors and a relay to control humidity on my RPI. Although I run my own scripts, I've been recently thinking about switching to Mycodo: https://kizniche.github.io/Mycodo/. It's a great opensource project that has a lot of pre-built controls-- including a PID to dial-in climate settings like humidity.

Click to expand...

Can you link the sensors that you've bought?

In general, checkout Adafruit, they carry many of sensors available for the pi and microcontrollers
Cool company as well. All the hardware is open-source, an MIT female founded the company. They manufacture in NYC.

They offer many their sensors with a "qwic" interface for easy ic2 connecting and daisy-chaining, very convenient.

Stunning build by the creator of the Mycodo framework that was mentioned by @Bishop12:
(I highly recommend the video.)

This guy is an expert maker, and apparently it is all self-taught. Amazing. I want to build something like this.

ComputerSaysNo said:

Can you link the sensors that you've bought?

Click to expand...

I'm using an SCD-41 in my downstairs tent: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5190. Very accurate for temp/humidity/co2

During early veg I was using this light sensor: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1980. I've pretty much stopped because I wasn't getting any value from the data. That being said, I still like to leave it plugged in to see how much "light penetration" I'm getting at the bottom of the tent.

A plain old DHT-11 in my upstairs tent: https://www.adafruit.com/product/386?

Also, if things are sold out on Adafruit, check out https://www.digikey.com. They also have TONS of other sensors that can be made compatible the RPI.


The CO2 sensor is my favourite! It's like I can watch the plants breath in real time.