- Hydroponics is a subset of hydroculture, which is a method of growing plants without soil by instead using water
- Hydroponic room is any room where hydroponic fodder is grown in controlled condition
- Hydroponic fodder is a cultivation of nutritious green fodder (grass) in water medium with added nutrients in it
- We can use seeds like Barley, Oats, Maize, Wheat, Jowar, Bajra to grow hydroponic fodder
- Since we are not using soil medium, to grow healthy fodder we have to control below important parameters Temperature Humidity Watering interval and time Ventilation Air circulation
- We cant maintain all above paramaters by mannual labour
- Using Raspberry pi and few sensors we can easily automate the whole process.
- Raspberry Pi
- 5V, 2A charger and micro USB charging cable
- 5V, 1A charger and micro USB charging cable
- 5V 10A 8 channel relay (For resistive load)
- 5V 30A single relay baord (For indusctive load)
- Adafruit DHT22 temperature & humidity sensor
- Optocoupler EL817
- USB hub
- 0.5 HP submersible water pump
- Four 60W exhaust fans
- Two 50W ventilation fan
- One 130W Air Cooler ( A.C is better than cooler)
- UPS (To save RPi from electricity outage and for safe shutdown) I have design my ouwn UPS but there are many solutions available in market
- It depends on the room size
- My room size is 15x18x9 => 2430 cub.ft => 69 cub.mtr
- Inlet and exhaust fan capacity is 450 cu.mtr/hr => 7.5 cu.mtr/min
- Since i am using 2 inlet and 2 exhaust fans, it will take approx 4.6 min to replace the air in the room
- It depends on seed type.
- I am using Maize seeds for which temp range is 25°C to 35°C and humidity range is 40% to 70%
- Please refer hydroponic.py for source code
- Raspberry pi will start the hydroponic.py on boot
- All the configurations and stats are stored in SQLite DB file (hydroponic.db)
- Table 'exhaustonofftime' contains timing for exhaust fans on and off state
- Table 'inletfanonofftime' conatins the timings for inlet fan on and off state
- Table 'pumponofftime' contains the timings for pump on and off state
- Table 'ventilationfanonofftime' contains the timings for ventilation fans on and off state
- Table 'deviceid' contains the details of the devices.
- Table 'sensors' contains the sensor details
- Table 'sensordata' in transactional table where all the sensor readings are stored
- Table 'pistats' is transactional table where pi usage details are stored.
- Application will read all the configurations from DB and store in disctionary objects
- In while loop app will reacord the hour minute value after every 5 seconds
- This value will be compared against config data to start or stop the device
- App will laso take the temp and humidity reading after every 10 seconds.
- If the temp is >= 32 then app will start the cooler rest all the time cooler remain stopped
- I am also using lightweight 'bottle' server. Running on localhost and 8080 port.
- Configured route '/hydroponic' to provide the simple GUI to user to start/stop any device.
- If you want to do this please follow the guide 'Hydroponic SD Card Setps'