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Monitoring my hydroponics

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Mike:
Decided to geek out this year and keep data on my hydroponics.  Since the beginning I've been measuring how much water and nutrients I've been adding.  I've also set it up to track the harvest weights of the tomatoes (which hasn't started yet).

Due to some power loss during the rain storms in April I hooked up a Raspberry PI to log every 5 minutes and put it on the same circuit.  That way if the power went out I'd know (by it not being responsive) and when (because of the log).

Last week I decided to step it up and add some sensors.  Ended up buying some water proof temperature probes and building a simple circuit to have them read by the Raspberry PI.  I've got a humidity sensor as well but it is causing a major voltage drop that kills the Pi so am waiting for the new Raspberry PI 4 to arrive and will try again with that.   I've also got a pH probe coming that I'll put in the tomato set up.

I have a simple webserver running on the Pi that serves up the data as a HTML table for the last 100 readings and a CSV export of all of them.  I then set up port forwarding on my router so that I can use the IMPORTDATA function in Google Sheet to load and graph the sensor data.

Interesting thing is that the tower has 20 plants (mostly herbs but some flowers) and the box has two tomato plants.  The tomatoes are out drinking the tower by a lot.

Mike:
I think I need to put my air probe in a protected case as it is kind of swingy and I think it is because it does get some sun.

Mike:
Added a pH sensor to the tomato box today.  After letting it settle it was reading 7.5 which is higher than I want it.  So added some acid the the thing swung around for a couple of hours as it got mixed in.  Settling in just over 6.5 so will probably add a bit more later.  I'll add a graph in a few days once I have more readings on it.

I was going to take some pictures of the setup by I'm honestly a little embarrassed in how much my (limited) soldering skills have degraded.  And, I'm not quite happy with the setup.  I have jumpers going to a solder breadboard.  I think the next thing I'll do is make a HAT for the Raspberry Pi and get a different enclosure (the current one is really tight).  And made some surface solder mats for some of the cables so I can attach cable connectors.

KnuckleBuckett:
I find the modern solders and fluxes to be pretty awful.

Mike:
I'm pretty confident when I say that the quality of the solder is not to blame.

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