Veg Predicament continued...
I thank you all for your input. The latest scores were. The Coco lady lives on.
I'll be honest, I was also leaning to the cull option. But you guys persuaded me to give it some more thought, so i did.
I've come up with an auto watering system which is driven by the moisture level in the coco. I have a prototype working. I have a better quality moisture sensor on the way as the proof of concept works. And this is what I will use to water this plant. It cost me about £50 to setup (excluding dripper and pumps etc).
In a nut shell, it's a Smart Power Socket and a Raspberry Pi Zero
which is connected to a moisture sensor in the coco:
Which does what it says on the tin. When the moisture goes below a certain threshold, the Pi turns on the smart socket (which is connected to the pump) for 1 minute. This pumps ~0.6L of nutrient through the drippers.
After that 1 minute, the pump is turned off. And the sensors wait for the moisture in the coco to drop below that threshold again before turning the pump on again.
I use these clips to keep the drippers in place on the pot:
A benefit of this whole project is that it means that the coco will never be dry but will be allowed to dry out to moist/barely moist. If i could do this by hand i would, but it's time consuming.
Another positive is that I won't have run off unless I want run off.
I'm still playing with the moisture levels and thresholds, I'll have them sussed in a few days, the concept is working. And it's saving me the trouble of having to hand feed. Which is a huge relief.
Here is my make shift case for the Pi until I work out a more safe home for it.
And here is the monster pot this plant is in. I usually don't like plants in really big pots, and I would only grow one with a pot this big if i t was automated, hence this project. I usually favour 12L-16L pots when I grow a few smaller plants, but this is quite big plant. I'm going to try and form a nice big root mass in that pot before I flip in about a week or so. It's a 35L pot filled about 2/3 of the way. 70/30 Coco/Perlite.
This is my makeshift drainage solution until I can think of something better. It will be better when I can move this into the tent that Audrey and Co are in as that has some more head room.
I'll probably cover this whole project with a separate journal, I just thought I'd let you guts know where I'm at with it and what I've been up to the past few days.
