Hydroponic Automation Platform (HAPI) / Blog: Recent posts

The HAPI Program is still active and we've got some awesome stuff to introduce over the next few weeks. Regarding the year-and-a-half of silence on SourceForge, the "long story short" is that Mark (xtec) and I spent that time discussing, designing and substantially refining the platform. We believe that it is now at a level of maturity where it can be productively evolved by a larger group.

As the components of the platform emerge, we will have a growing need for testers, implementors, developers, technical writers, evangelists and critics. If you are in a position to lend a hand in any of these areas, please do!... read more

Just realized that I hadn't shared a ton of project-related news over to this blog. First, the engineering team is finishing designs for 96 plant vertical grow unit. It's a real beauty and construction of the first prototype has already begun at the Columbus Idea Foundry. The prototype costs are being covered with a grant we received from the Human Services Research and Technology Institute. I'll post images as the build progresses.... read more

Representatives from The Intelligent Community Forum http://www.intelligentcommunity.org/ stopped by the HPF last night. As part of their review of Columbus (competing for title of Smartest City in the World), Columbus' Mayor sent them over to the Columbus Idea Foundry to check out the local maker space. They stopped in to the HPF and chatted about a wide variety of related topics for about 15 minutes. Great exposure for the project!... read more

I've been working to get readings from an Atlas Scientific pH sensor. There is a probe that connects to a female BNC connector. The BNC connector is wired to a pH circuit on my breadboard. An Arduino Uno is connected to the pH circuit with a 2-wire SoftSerial connection using digital pins 3 & 4. I loaded up the vendor provided test program and things went South fast. I was to the point where I couldn't even upload the Blink program to the Uno due to Serial exceptions. The whole thing worked fine under Windows 7, the problems only existed on the Pi. I fought this for most of an evening and most of the night. Here's what I learned: under some Linux variants, avrdude cannot program the Arduino board at a baud rate other than 9600. I currently believe that running the Serial Monitor at other than 9600 is a bad idea. I think it changes the serial debug_rate in ~/.arduino/preferences.txt at which point you can no longer upload ANY program to the Arduino. I was using 38400 because Atlas says you have to use 38400. However, the 38400 baud rate restriction seems to apply only to the SoftSerial interface between the Arduino and the pH circuit. In the sketch, I changed the Serial speed (baud rate for Arduino to Pi comm) to 9600 and left the SoftSerial at 38400. (A prior test with both at 9600 failed.) With Serial (USB) at 9600 and SoftSerial at 38400, I am now able to get consistent pH readings from the Atlas probe into Uno and over to the Pi. Might do a short video showing this configuration.... read more

I created a short video that describes the components used to control a HAPI site remotely.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G59H2Jt0KKQ

Tyler