LED/Christmas light projects
Just a friendly reminder to pick up some discounted LED or non-LED Christmas lights for some of my previous projects
Christmas LED Grow Box
Basically take a old Rubbermaid container and drill some holes and insert lights and you have your own Christmas light LED grow box. This worked great last year to hold my seedlings until they were ready to move into the bigger grow box in the garage. Here are some posts on construction and updates:
Cheap LED Light and Grow Box
Christmas light LED grow box – Update #1
Christmas light LED grow box – Update #2
Supplemental Christmas LED Light
Similar idea to the LED grow box, though used in addition to your normal grow lights for a little additional red wavelength light, see posts below for complete construction directions:
Make your own supplemental LED grow light
Heating row tunnels (or grow box) with non-LED lights
Replacing your old Christmas lights with LEDs to save on your electricity bill? You can use your old regular old Christmas lights to heat your row tunnels to increase the temperature by about 10 degrees to help get your plants out a ahead of schedule. I have been using some of mine in my grow box to help during some of our colder nights this winter.
Heating row tunnels and grow box with Christmas lights
Tags: cheap, garden seeds, grow lights, growbox, led, outdoor plants, vegetables
EcoSmart Garden Insect Control Review and Giveaway
15.3 years ago aphids, giveaway, peppermint
One of the major disadvantages to growing plants indoors is the lack of beneficial insects. In a larger environment like a greenhouse you could release some ladybugs to initiate an aphid slaughter though the thought of 1500+ ladybugs investing my garage where my grow box resides does not seem like a good idea. I am always open to trying out new products so when EcoSmart contacted me if I was interested in trying out their garden insect control products I jumped at the opportunity.
I explained the problems I have with pests in my indoor growing and they suggested “Garden Insect Killer” Their documentation states, “Kills and repels garden insects and mites. Kills exposed eggs, larvae and adult stages.” This seemed to be exactly what I was looking for so once the first onset of pests arrived I applied liberally to tops and bottoms of leaves and so far the results are great. Not only were this effective on the little buggers, given the selection of Rosemary, Peppermint, Thyme, Clove oils it actually makes the garage smell pretty nice as an added bonus.
Want to try this out for yourself the great people at EcoSmart have offered to give away a bottle of any of their products. So under normal rules, enter a comment and a winner will randomly be selected and sent a bottle of their choice. Comment must be submitted by Friday, December 18th 2009 at midnight (Pacific) to be considered for the drawing. Good luck.
Tags: growbox, outdoor plants, pepper plants, peppermint plant
Heating row tunnels and grow box with Christmas lights
15.3 years ago cheap, indoor growbox
Currently it is 16 degrees outside and given my grow box containing jalapeno peppers is in my unheated detached garage, which can bring some challenges. Like most plants, peppers will continue to grow in the range of 60 to 90 degrees, but thrive in 70 to 90 degrees. With the lights on the grow box gets to about 60 degrees but drips to the 50’s at night. This will result in plants having stunted growth and begin dropping blossoms before they can start bearing fruit.
My solution, a string of green mini Christmas lights. Just to clarify these are your typical small bulb Christmas lights not LEDs, given the efficiency of LEDs they do not product much extra heat which is what I am going for here. I also chose green Christmas lights because plants do not absorb this wavelength very well so they can be left on at night to keep heating while still letting the plants “sleep”.
Of course results will vary depending on the size of your grow box or outside row tunnel, insulation, and exterior temperature, but I am seeing 8-10 degree increase in temperature with a single string (50 bulbs)
I am always open to new ideas to safely, cheaply and efficiently heat my grow box or row tunnel so if anyone has any other suggestions please add a comment.
Tags: cheap, grow lights, growbox, led, outdoor plants, pepper plants
Best DIY cheap soil moisture sensor
15.4 years ago cheap, electronics, moisture sensor, water
My first version of my cheap soil moisture sensor has worked great for me but it did have a couple flaws. The first issue was construction, though I had great luck on my first attempt though after trying to recreate additional sensors given the small amount of gypsum between the sensor and the probes were so thin it was extremely easy to crack the sensor and I normally have about a 25% success rate on later creations (must have had beginners luck on the first one.
The second issue was durability. Given we are playing with gypsum and as it is suspended in water it will eventually breakdown and there is very little we can do about it. Though with my latest changes to my automated grow box which includes automated watering based on moisture content I want to ensure my measurements stay accurate throughout the season. To help with this I have decided to increase the sensors size and also am using galvanized nails to prevent rusting. After a few attempts I have come up what I feel is a pretty foolproof method of creating a moisture sensor.
How it works:
There were many questions in the comments in the previous post so hopefully I can clear this up a little here.
Technically a gypsum block measures soil water tension. When the gypsum block is dry it is not possible for electricity to pass between the probes, essentially making the probe an insulator with infinite resistance.
As water is added to the problem more electrons can pass between the probes effectively reducing the amount of resistance between the problem to the point when it is fully saturated where the probe has virtually zero resistance. By using this range of values you can determine the amount of water than exists in your soil.
Parts for cheap soil moisture sensor:
- Plaster of Paris
- 2 Galvanized Finish Nails
- 1/2 inch plastic tubing
- utility knife
Construction:
Take your utility knife and cut the tubing slightly longer than your galvanized finishing nails. Try to make the cut as straight as possible though it doesn’t have to be completely perfect.
Use your utility knife to cut the smaller plastic tube lengthwise, this will allow easier removal of your soil sensor after the mold cures.
Optional: Make the cut diagonally to prevent a potential vertical fracture line.
If you were very careful on you vertical cuts you can avoid this step, but to completely avoid spilling plaster onto my workbench I drilled four holes slightly larger than your tubing. I used these holes for support but also to catch any of the plaster in the gaps from you less than accurate vertical cuts.
Being careful that the tubing fits together where you split the tubing vertically, insert the tubes into the holes (or carefully on a flat surface) Mix Plaster of Paris and carefully fill with to the top. The friction between the tubing should keep a water tight seal where you made the cut, though if the plaster is a little thin and it appears to be leaking through wait a couple minute for the plaster to setup some and try again, at that time it should not have the viscosity to seep through the very small gap that may be causing the leak.
Take your two galvanized nails and push them through a small piece of wax paper. You may also allow the plaster to setup for a few minutes and then float the nails in the the plaster. I like the first method since gravity will help ensure they fall straight down and parallel to each other. As for spacing, I have done some experimentation with the gaps between the probes and my conclusion was, it doesn’t make much difference. As long as there is a gap (they are not touching) you should get reliable results.
After allowing the sensor to cure for about and hour remove it from the holes you drilled in the wood.
Gently pull back the plastic tubing and you have a nice clean soil sensor.
Lay them out to dry for 24 hours to cure completely and their construction is complete.
For attaching the wires there are a couple options. The best would be to solder them to the probes though to do this you need to heat up the nail hot enough to enable a strong solder connection. My little 15W soldering iron just can’t produce the heat for this so I am option for the wire wrap method. I take about an inch of wire and strip off about an inch of insulation and tightly wrap around the probe. Given copper will rust and could be a point of failure you will want to insulate this connection and the probes from the moisture. A few dabs of hot glue works pretty well. I am planning on trying liquid plastic, though I am currently out and when I have some on hand I will update with how it went.
How to use your cheap soil moisture sensor
You can simply hook up a multi-meter and check the resistance though if you want to create anything automated you would need to use an integrated circuit (IC) or a electronics prototyping platform such as Arduino. By applying voltage to one side of the sensor and using a voltage splitting circuit connected to ground and an analog input you can then measure the voltage making it through the probe. The higher the voltage, the higher the moisture content of the soil.
Conclusion
The above should give you everything you need to know to create your own cheap soil moisture sensor and how to use it. This can be used as a moisture soil sensor for watering your indoor plants like I am using it. This same moisture sensor could be for monitoring your outside soil moisture content to trigger (or preempt your irrigation system) to save some money on your water bill and/or maintain consistent moisture levels in your plants which could drastically improve water sensitive crops such as tomatoes.
Tags: arduino, cheap, growbox, led, outdoor plants, tomato plants, vegetables
Twittering computer grow box
15.4 years ago indoor growbox, twitter
Well this is pretty much clichéd nerdiness but given it only required a couple of lines of C# I couldn’t resist. I have updated my grow box software to “tweet” some sort of semi-humorous and not really witty comment appropriate to its current state and share its current temperature and moisture content every 2.5 hours.
For those who want to do something similar, this is how I did it. I one of the many twitter C# libraries and for no specific reason I chose tweetsharp and after adding a reference to their DLL and just the few lines of code (below) you can be programmatically making updates via twitter.
private void UpdateStatus(string message)
{
IFluentTwitter twitter = FluentTwitter.CreateRequest();
twitter.AuthenticateAs("user_name", "password");
twitter.Statuses().Update(message);
twitter.AsUrl();
string response = twitter.Request();
}
If you want to see it in action go to http://twitter.com/computergrowbox.
Right now I only have a handful of not so witty comments, so if you have some good zingers add them to the comments and if I like them I will add them to the list.
UPDATE: Grow box shares its own pictures
I get busy these days and sometimes can’t make it out to keep a close eye on my plants in the grow box. Given I have everything automated the box basically takes care of them, though I thought it would be nice if I could see how they are doing so added photo sharing to the grow box’s twittering software.
I already have the software taking pictures every so often so all I really needed to do what send out the most recent file to twitter. After a little looking I found that tweetsharp already supported this so yet again this was just a few lines of code to implement.
First I needed the logic to determine the last photo I have taken, fortunately I was carefully about my naming using a timestamp based name similar to “Photo_2008_10_01_090130.jpg”, so alphabetical sorting would work just fine. I removed the error handling to keep things brief but here is the code to complete this logic:
string[] files = Directory.GetFiles(photoDirectory, "*.jpg"); Array.Sort<string>(files); string fileToUpload = files[files.Length - 1];
Now you have your photo to upload just signup for one of the photo TwitPic using your twitter account and run the following code using your credentials.
IFluentTwitter twitter = FluentTwitter.CreateRequest(); twitter.AuthenticateAs("user_name", "password"); twitter.Photos().PostPhoto(fileToUpload, SendPhotoServiceProvider.TwitPic); twitter.Statuses().Update("My Picture").AsJson().Request();
Hopefully this, you too can make you own grow box (or other inanimate object) share its feelings on twitter.
Tags: growbox, outdoor plants
Computer controlled grow box – Part 2
15.5 years ago indoor growbox, water
Though I have made some significant changes to the grow box controller, the actual grow box has undergone some minor but important changes over the past few months.
Automated watering
Now I must say this one is pretty darn simple. Though I will be planning on a slightly more complicated hydroponic setup later I decided to start with a very easy bottom watering technique. Just take a regular old fountain pump (I went with the cheapest I could find) drop it in a 5 gallon bucket of water and attach a hose long enough to reach your planting tray and plug in the power to the pump to your grow box controller and that’s about it.
To prevent evaporation and algae and little bugs making a home in my nice bucket of water, I added a lid with two holes for the water output and power input. The power input required me to make a straight cut with a utility knife to ensure a snug fit while not requiring me to cur the AC line to feed the wire through.
I also cut a hole of the same size as the water output on the bucket lid to the grow box to allow the line to enter while still keeping the box closed.
Exhaust fan control
Air circulation is important for plants to be healthy but when the box gets warmer than expected I installed two controlled CPU fans to help regulate temperate as well as one static fan that constantly pushes air from the top to bottom.
I added a 12 volt exhaust fan to the top of the box (pictured above) to help push hot air out of the grow box with another (pictured below) at the lower part of the grow box to push in cold air as needed. Both of these fans are powered by a 12 volt power wall adapter plugged into the grow box controller.
Heating
Though the computer and lights allow the box to create a comfortable internal temperature, sometimes it needs a little help. For this I installed a regular old seedling heater to hopefully take a little sting out of the cold floor the seed tray is sitting one. Like other components this was simply plugged into the grow box controller.
Putting it all together
My previous version was a little sloppily put together with duct/packing tape (lets just call it prototyping). Though this added some hackiness appear it wasn’t too functional so I added a little strip of wood to support a couple hinges which I created a top which holds the LCD panel.
Upon opening the top you can see the grow box controller and the state of the art 600 MHz PC in all their glory.
As you can see I have still have some cleaning up to do with compress air and maybe a few more zip ties but all in all everything seems to have come together nicely.
Tags: cheap, garden seeds, grow lights, growbox, led, outdoor plants, vegetables
