[Instrument Tek] isn’t messing around with a hobby-sized greenhouse. In fact if it were any bigger we’d call it a commercial operation. But what interests us is the professional-quality greenhouse automation he built around and Arduino board.
The greenhouse is about what you’d expect to see at a nursery, except the footprint is somewhere around 10’x10′. It’s a stick-built frame with walls made of poly. Professional greenhouses monitor and regulate temperature and humidity and this one does just that. The video after the break starts off by showing the controller box. It has temperature, humidity, and light sensors that allow the Arduino to judge growing conditions. If it gets too hot, some slats are opened and a fan exhausts air from the structure. If it gets to cold, a series of light fixtures are energized. They contain heat lamps, as this setup is in northern Alberta, Canada and it can get quite cold some nights. The drip system is also automated, with a solenoid to turn water on and off.
In addition to that 3:26 show-and-tell, we’ve embedded a 27-minute video that shows how to build the controller box. So you can start you plants indoors on the rack, then populate the greenhouse when they get large enough.
Continue reading “Large-scale Arduino Controlled Greenhouse Does Some Serious Farming”
