This is so cool!
Nobody is using arduino's with HA anymore. You can order hardware that works out of the box for nearly everything. A wifi enabled light is dead simple.
All OP would have to do is order an RGB light that works with HA, plug it in, add it and then setup an automation. HA has made all this doable through the UI now, so no YAML unless you really want to. I have like 15 of these for my garden setup.
You can also apparently electrically trigger the closing of fly trap - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.4161/psb.2.3.4217
Beer yeast will make chloramine / chlorine water taste like plastic! Learned the hard way. :)
Simple waterbutt attached to the drain pipe off the guttering and you get infinite free water for them
This is so much better than "rain barrel".
Read literally any book about caring for them. They like acidic soil. Rain water is slightly acidic.
It might take a year or more to kill a plant by slowly draining its soil of acidity. Just like it can take a year to kill a big plant via inadequate lighting.
My carnivorous plants are by the window and I water them once in a while, never had issue.
I thought about automating water supply but even me, a geek, realized it would be a waste of time.
You call it "cutting-edge" in the README.
There are some hints here that this is just a bit of light-hearted fun.
At the top, just below[0] the title.
Anyway, great project and worth pushing beyond being a "toy project" imo. But like few other commenters - seeing LEDs you used immediately rubbed me the wrong way.
I tend to seed my peppers in Dec/Jan (in Central Europe), ~1.5-2 months before you would normally do it. Without proper growlights and FANs they would get too tall before releasing leaves and have "leggy", too thin stem, to be moved to windy outdoors in Apr/May. These kinds of plants grow too tall if they don't "detect" proper [sun]light and don't spawn leaves since there's no light required for photosynthesis at given height.
My use-case (leggy, thin stems that break under outdoor wind) isn't translatable to yours but my point here is: having a set of dedicated red and blue LEDs with certain wavelenghts (red 630nm-660nm, blue 450-470nm, depending on plant species) is the key to emulate natural sunglight. Other wavelenghts are cool for decorative purposes but it's still "darkness" for plants. I used to buy small PCBs and LEDs dedicated for soldering together with reds and blues of different wavelenghts ratio one requires but nowadays I'm going mostly with ready-to-use grow lamps as I grow rather not that demanding plants.
Your project is great, shows your dedication and already doesn't at all seem like a "toy project". I'd love to see it extended to different kinds of plants!
[0] https://github.com/blackrabbit17/xenolab/blob/129af07788909e...
[0] https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2193.html
[1] https://thepihut.com/products/7-dsi-capacitive-touch-display...
Now I'm itching to do something with them :)
I was motivated by Star Trek a lot when I was very young, and having some futuristic bit of tech beside me while I work (that I created) reminds me that we are all working towards building that future, even just symbolically.
Building this gave me utter joy at learning CAD, figuring out electronics problems, understanding difficulties 3D printers have, finding electronic components here in NZ, figuring out bugs while typing commands like “restart sunlight” was amusing.
The final product is really just a byproduct and reminder, the primary source of joy is the act of creation
This is also a huge problem for people having a terrarium with geckos or saurians - they see and need much different wavelengths than we humans do.
I am no expert for carnivorous plants - maybe they are fine but seeing that there is no UV emitting part in the lighting setup, there may be an important part of the spectrum missing for the plants.
But surely there are LEDs optimised for that task (Cannabis grow lights)
Someone I know had a very successful indoor cannabis grow using nothing but a cool white outdoor LED panel light from the local hardware store.
A good video with a short intro why resistive sensors suck, and what to pay attention to with capacitive sensors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGP38bz-K48
This sounds very solarpunk mixed with cyberpunk. I love it.
Is the Pi 5 really necessary though, especially since it's one per plant? The Pi 4 would surely be up to the challenge of rendering that while using less power and would be cheaper.
Originally, before I knew which plants I would use, I was going to use ML models to measure the surface area of the plants, and in earlier versions (before the camera) I had rotating, high polygon 3D models.
So I threw a bit more hardware at it than it needed because I didn’t want to have my future ideas limited by hardware
This is my first project where I integrated many things together, and it went through a few iterations (I replaced the lights twice)
I think the key was: patience
There were many times where I didn’t have the right connections, or screws, or cables or I needed more diodes when I probably could have got away without it - things like this - where I refused to take a shortcut, ordered the part in the mail and waited, which often meant I couldn’t proceed - so “that’s enough today”
giuliomagnifico•9mo ago
omneity•9mo ago
Source: My finger, unscathed after an encounter with a Dionaea.