DIY Data Logger - Dabbling with Arduino

[weedabix]

So I am slowly getting there - I had a few stupid hickups... such as bad cables, bad contacts or me just accidentally pulling out a cable! But now finally it's been running a bit and the data looks ok!
So this is the data:
temperature and humidity are straight forward... these somewhat make sense...
The light intensity is the percentage of an arbitrary value. And plotted is only the minimum of each our. This means that if the light value is 0 - lights are off, if it's close to 98% lights are on and if it's somewhere in the middle, I had only another white light on at any point in that hour e.g. when I was opening the tent to look after them.
The height measures the hight from a sensor to the light - the sensor is currently ca 5cm above the plants together with the light sensor... the humidity and temperature were measured at the height of the pots.
This is the setup:

Next steps:
- barometer (to check the fan's working)
- soil humidity sensor (for the fun of it)
- connect it to a server
- solder it
- put it in a box (I have to find a good box for it G3!)

So yes, i'd like to make it a bit more permanent but I have no illusions about the accuracy of the whole thing - but I'm pretty sure my chinese thermometer for 5 quid probably uses the same or cheaper components! And in the end it's not necessary and more a cool thing to play around with.

Fun times ahead!

[weedabix]

So after long time struggling, I finally managed to make an iteration to this project. I am now using a smaller processor (nodemcu) with a BME280 and a photodiode (all together maybe £5-6, connected to my wifi and sending it to Thingspeak, an IoT platform. Now I can see online from anywhere: The temperature, relative humidity, pressure, and light level in my growroom. Temperature and humidity are obviously important, pressure and light were intended so I can check whether the fan is working and I have a lower pressure in the tent, light, so I can check the lights are on or off. Both these aren't working well yet - so more to fiddle, the temperature and humidity are working great! Next project:
- fix light sensor
- place another pressure sensor outside the tent to adjust for atmospheric pressure
- write little code to 1. plot min/max temperature/rh 2. Plot VPD

So it's never ending ;-) but that's the fun of it!
Ask me if you want to know any details!

[weedabix]

Little update... I got the light sensor working now, so it tells me whether the light is on or off from anywhere and gives me some data to stare at when I'm procrastinating...
This is a recent screenshot, you can see that I looked at the plants during lights off, turning on the "work light" - giving only half the signal of the normal light. Once the normal light turns on at 12.30 the temperature goes up and therefore the rh goes down. Also if the light is running, the button is green. The air was super dry recently so I put a small humidifier in the tent and it's now at a reasonable level. Next I need to fix the pressure sensor and do some more fun stuff with the data. The whole thing runs fairly stable, but every now and then (like once every two days) I have to restart it... maybe that's something I can fix.

[weedabix]

costs are:

BME280: £0.99-5
Nodemcu esp 8266: £3-6
photoresistor: £1 for 10

Breadboard, usb cable, resistor (10k ohm) each pretty cheap...

so if you build 3 of them, and you buy them cheap from china, you might get away with maybe £10-15 for all three of them... if you buy the parts on amazon and get some tools and make some mistakes, it gets a bit more expensive.
I ordered lots of things I didn't need, ordered some wrong parts, tried and played around so I have definitely paid more than £5 for it.

Let me know if you need help with it.

[Mafooo]

Weedabix, praise man. This is legit sir! I would really like to get in on the arduino and raspberry pi robotics builds for data logging and also automation in the future :)

I have some books on how to make sensors and program raspberry pi and arduino units. Just havent made the time or investment to move forward with it.

Def checking in on this

[weedabix]

Cool, let me run this for a while and I'll see whether it works on a longer scale.. I can then write up a more detailed report of what I did...

[weedabix]

latest addition, I added a VPD calculator. This tells me the VPD assuming a leaf temperature of 1ºC below ambient temperature.
And I added a cool little dial that tells me that this VPD is constantly too high and I can't do fuck all about it.

[weedabix]

Newest addition to the tools: A fan malfunction warning! I have built another pressure sensor that sits outside the tent and now I can see whether the tent is open or not, or if the fan is not sucking enough! By showing the difference between outside pressure and inside pressure, I can see whether I have a negative pressure difference sucking air into the tent at all times. This pressure difference is currently at around 300 Pa. In comparison: Wheather changes produce changes in the range of maybe 2000 Pa. I will let this run for a while to see how stable it is! If it drops below 100 Pa, a red light will go on.

[Mafooo]

Legit man. Im liking all these ideas

At the indoor farm I was at we were developing proprietary Human-Machine-Interface software so we could control all the automation in the farm. Water tank level sensors, water pressure sensors in the lines, motion sensors to track the movement of the spray wands in the root zone... man so many things!

Your project is bringing back a lotta good memories. Wishing I had the time and tools to be working on this myself

[seymore_budz]

Nice work! I've always wanted to get something up and running but lack of time and motivation is a killer. My idea was to make some of the sensors wireless using zigbee mesh. Following :)