No where near enough light for the plants. he needs to quadruple the number of LED’s and add some read and blue ones to actually get light that the plants would want in there.

P.S. a biosphere in sunlight = cooked biosphere I had an executive buy one of those high dollar ones that had a live shrimp in it and was all hand blown glass cook it by putting it in the sun. Internal temps got high enough to bust the glass sphere from air and water vapor pressure.

Alastair: The white LEDs don’t exactly emit a narrow spectrum of light. What they produce is a sharp peak in blue and then a wider peak in yellow frequencies. [<a href="http://ledmuseum.candlepower.us/twelfth/nspwf50d.gif"LED-Museum-linl]

The problem is that this is not the distribution of frequencies which plants use. If you had added in some red LEDs, the plants would probably have grown normally.

The fruitfly/knat like bugs were probably fungus gnats due to overwatering. If the soil doesn’t have the chance to dry out between waterings, fungus will grow and attract/feed fungus gnats.

I got the inspiration for this project from lifehacker here:
http://lifehacker.com/5508166/make-a-biosphere-for-a-low-maintenance-cubicle-companion
However, I did also get some help from a few local aquarium stores. White LEDs are used in a number of low-light aquariums and the particular plants I got are well suited for this kind of LED lit environment. The one aquarium store I went to had a similar (but professional) setup involving LED lighting and the plants in it were very healthy.

See a link for an update on the project.

Yep, the chip is a bit overkill, but it was free (in my parts bin) and it’s always better to have more IOs than less :)