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Nerves Based Grow Tent Firmware and UI

this is a poncho application with the Phoenix application in /grow_tent and the Nerves application in /grow_tent_firmware the software is built and deployed from the firmware directory

Getting Started

If you have not built anything with Nerves there is some initial setup to get things working Follow the steps here that define all the things you need for each OS to be able to get to the end goal of installing nerves_bootstrap

Env Vars

In order to make this firmware work on multiple configurations for different devices currently it takes some vars during the build burn stage to tell the system what hostname to use and what sensors are on the board and should be enabled and communicated with.

DEVICE_NAME is used for the hostname device_name.local and also used for the metrics grow_device_name.sensors.temp_c reporting via the Prometheus device_name.local:9568/metrics endpoint.

SENSORS is used to define what sensors should be active and communicated with on the device. This is passed in as a csv string SENSORS=scd30,bmp3,tsl2951,soil_stick Not all devices need to have the same sensors. ie. If you have 2 tents in the same room, only one of those tents may have a c02 sensor (scd30), while the other could have a simpler and cheaper temp/rh sensor. Also something with soil_stick does not need calculate VPD with temp and rh if it is in a tent that has other devices that can. The curent list of supported sensors are

  • scd30 Scd30 Temp/Rh/C02 SCD30
  • bmp3 Bmp3XX Altitude/Ambient Pressure/Temp BMP3XX
  • soil_stick Soil Stick Soil Moisture/Temp (In Development) Soil Stick Stemma
  • tsl2951 Tsl2951 Lux/Raw Luminosity (This sensor is currently not 100% and can crash when lights go out) TSL2951

Building and Burning Firmware

The first burn to get the firmware onto your device via sd card

# 1) prep ui application
cd grow_tent
mix deps.get # if not done yet
npm install --prefix assets --production
npm run deploy --prefix assets
mix phx.digest

# 2) build / burn firmware
cd ../grow_tent_firmware
export MIX_TARGET=rpi3 # or whatever device your using
# If you're using WiFi:
# export NERVES_NETWORK_SSID=your_wifi_name
# export NERVES_NETWORK_PSK=your_wifi_password
DEVICE_NAME=tent1 SENSORS=scd30,bmp3 mix firmware.burn -d /dev/yoursdcard
# once burn is finished pop sd card into device and boot
# wait like 3 minutes or if bored ping tent1.local til it comes online
ssh tent1.local  # this gives you an iex session into the device

After the initial burn an run update using the upload script

# 1) prep ui application
cd grow_tent
mix deps.get # if not done yet
npm install --prefix assets --production
npm run deploy --prefix assets
mix phx.digest

# 2) build / burn firmware
cd ../grow_tent_firmware
export MIX_TARGET=rpi3 # or whatever device your using
# If you're using WiFi:
# export NERVES_NETWORK_SSID=your_wifi_name
# export NERVES_NETWORK_PSK=your_wifi_password
DEVICE_NAME=tent1 SENSORS=scd30,bmp3 mix firmware
./upload.sh tent1.local _build/rpi3_dev/nerves/images/grow_tent_firmware.fw
# wait like 3 minutes or if bored ping tent1.local til it comes online
ssh tent1.local  # this gives you an iex session into the device

A Note About Sensors

After testing this for a while in a couple of tents I realized that alot of these sensors are optional for what one really needs to dial in an indoor grow environment. Having C02 readings is nice but the sensor/breakout is almost $60 usd. Unless you plan on pumping up the C02 levels, it is optional. If you do plan on pumping the C02 levels you should get a controller anyways since C02 in too high of a concentration in an indoor space is not fun. The Altitude / Pressure sensor is not really needed. I wanted to test differences in the C02 readings by starting the sensor with pressure readings. The Tsl2951 Lux is extra but would be nice if your trying to dial in lighting for maximum yeild. The sensor is unstable and needs more error handling in the code.

Really, just a simple Temp/Rh sensor over I2C is fine. Something like this for $7 SHTC3 With this you can calculate the VPD and dew point to some accuracy. The Temp, Rh and VPD are the things that matter the most.

This may not be the long term solution but is working for now. I think it may be better to have differnt configuration files in the future that one could define for each deployment setup.

Dashboard

If you have gotten this far and burned this to a device and are wondering, "Hey Pickle, where the hell is the Dashboard part of this Grow Tent Dashboard?" I am glad you asked. So this Nerves applicaiton with Phoenix and LiveView (prbbly not needed now) just serves up a prometheus style /metrics endpoint. All the telemetry metrics selected will be available to scrape from there. Personally I run InfluxDB as my dashboard and it runs in Docker on another machine on my local network. I choose InfluxDB b/c it was dead simple to get going and I was able to get a dasboard built out in under an hour without having to pay for a service. Other things like this may be better but it is up to the end user what actual dasboard to use.

sudo docker run -d --name influxdb -p 8086:8086 -v  /tmp/testdata/influx:/root/.influxdbv2 --network influxdb-telegraf-net quay.io/influxdb/influxdb:v2.0.3
  • Go to http://localhost:8086/
  • Create Buckets for each DEVICE_NAME Create Buckets
  • Setup Scrapers for each device by ip address (I tried using the tent1.local but that id not work 🤷) Scraper Setup
  • Create Dashboard and graphs for the sensor data Add Graphs
  • Dashboard With Graphs Dashboard

Standard Nerves Phx Starter Docs

This example demonstrates a basic poncho project for deploying a Phoenix Framework-based application to a Nerves device. A "poncho project" is similar to an umbrella project except that it's actually multiple separate-but-related Elixir apps that use path dependencies instead of in_umbrella dependencies. You can read more about the motivations behind this concept on the embedded-elixir blog post about Poncho Projects.

Hardware

This example serves a Phoenix-based web page over the network. The steps below assume you are using a Raspberry Pi Zero, which allows you to connect a single USB cable to the port marked "USB" to get both network and serial console access to the device. By default, this example will use the virtual Ethernet interface provided by the USB cable, assign an IP address automatically, and make it discoverable using mDNS (Bonjour). For more information about how to configure the network settings for your environment, including WiFi settings, see the vintage_net documentation.

How to Use this Repository

  1. Connect your target hardware to your host computer or network as described above

  2. Prepare your Phoenix project to build JavaScript and CSS assets:

    # These steps only need to be done once.
cd ui
mix deps.get
npm install --prefix assets

  3. Build your assets and prepare them for deployment to the firmware:

    # Still in ui directory from the prior step.
# These steps need to be repeated when you change JS or CSS files.
npm install --prefix assets --production
npm run deploy --prefix assets
mix phx.digest

  4. Change to the firmware app directory

    cd ../firmware

  5. Specify your target and other environment variables as needed:

    export MIX_TARGET=rpi0
# If you're using WiFi:
# export NERVES_NETWORK_SSID=your_wifi_name
# export NERVES_NETWORK_PSK=your_wifi_password

  6. Get dependencies, build firmware, and burn it to an SD card:

    mix deps.get
mix firmware
mix firmware.burn

  7. Insert the SD card into your target board and connect the USB cable or otherwise power it on

  8. Wait for it to finish booting (5-10 seconds)

  9. Open a browser window on your host computer to http://nerves.local/

  10. You should see a "Welcome to Phoenix!" page

Learn More