Hi everybody, i was thinking about doing a microcontroller-project for a couple of weeks now and i decided to start something called 'SmartGarden', a fully automated garden to grow herbs and vegetables for self supply without any skills in gardening.

As i am an IT-Administrator, i have knowledge in electrotechnics and i am aware of the power of the RaspberriPi, so i decided this would be the core of my project. I already planned the first steps and made a sheet with all functions i want to implement. Also an efficient design of the garden and some ideas for a GUI i have in my mind.

Yesterday while i was researching more backround information i stumbled over this site/project and to my surpirse the hydrosys4 is almost exactly what i am about to do :)

It is amazing and very well documented. Thank you for sharing your work!

I will start to implement and run the hydrosys in my project in next days, so glad that you made that open source. But I don't want to 'just copy' your work, i have some ideas in my head that maybe enhance your work and i want to share/work together with you all in this (quiet small) community :)

My project is in the very beginning, but some hints to my ideas you can find in my blog (link in my profile). Some topics i was thinking about, but didn't find in hydrosys yet:

- a plant database with meta data about the plants (like ideal conditions to grow). It would be nice for the user to 'drag&drop' the seeded plants in the GUI in a visualisation of the field and the watering plan will 'automatically' generated bases on the database

- something like a KI / garden-logic

- a 'smartGarden year-cycle' - seperated in 2 seasons (winter/summer) where you can switch the place of your garden between outdoor/indoor. Outdoor with greenhouse features and indoor with artificial light. The setup will build modular so it should be easy to move the garden

- a 4 field separation of the garden with one field subdivided to 4 smaller fields for herbs (hard to explain, i will show the set of the garden if there is something to see)

- the GUI in my mind is with less options and parameters, i want it easy to handle like it is an apple product ;) but this is something i had no experience yet so i will check out the hydrosys GUI in the first place and see whats possible.

- statistics and diagrams with grafana (don't know how the graphs in hydrosys are generated, but grafana is one of the nicest visualisation tools for graphs i know)

- The intention of the 'smartGarden' is the self-supply idea. I want an ecological and economical system for maximum sustainability. I will experiment with solar-panels and rechargable batteries for the power supply.

Feel free to comment my ideas, share your experiences or just say hello :)

I'm glad to found this project/community and i'm looking forward to interesting developments in the area of smart gardening

Happy growing y'all!

so long, R3000