First, a video: I’ve worked very hard since my last update to move all of the hardware that interfaces the Raspberry Pi with the plants (GPIO, ADC etc) from on board the Raspberry Pi using the GIPO to a daughterboard based around an Arduino. This has been a lot of work to accomplish, but as…

So in my last posting of the PiPlanter source code, the python script alone was 500 lines long. The intent with was to make things more modular and generic compared to the original version of the code that ran two years ago. Since the project has expanded a considerable amount since two summers ago, my…

Ten days ago I finished installing the third ever instance of the PiPlanter in a lab in the physics department at my college! I went with the the rack mounted design as I did this past summer, and am going to be growing Basil, Cilantro and Parsley as opposed to tomatoes. Here are some photos…

The CANSPI board is a nice integration of the MCP2515 CAN Bus Controller and the MCP2551 CAN Bus Transceiver. To interface with these boards I’m using an Arduino Nano and the Seeed Studio CAN Bus Shield Library. Here are some photos of the configuration, including the switch position on the CANSPI being used: The wiring diagram goes as…

Since I returned to college the PiPlanter has been running without me having to do any maintenance on it at all. The plants are still alive and growing and all processes associated with the PiPlanter are still going. I figure now is a good a time as any to bring together all of the work…

In addition to the directions in this post on getting the ADC working, the following must be run to get the current version of the PiPlanter up and running. sudo apt-get install python-imaging python-imaging-tk python-pip python-dev git apache2 mysql-server php5 php5-mysql python-mysqldb sudo python-serial sudo pip install tweepy apscheduler spidev wiringpi wget https://gdata-python-client.googlecode.com/files/gdata-2.0.18.tar.gz tar -xzvf gdata-2.0.18.tar.gz…

In order to keep things moving quickly, I’ve decided to take a shortcut when it comes to uploading timelapse videos to youtube. I’ve decided to basically create a function that passes data to youtube-upload, a command line utility for linux that can upload videos very simply. Here’s the function: def UploadVideo(video,email,password): humantime = str(datetime.now().strftime("%m/%d/%Y")) title…

I bought a wire rack from walmart and put the PiPlanter back inside my house. Hopefully the plants will live longer than they did last year so while I’m at college I can continue to develop on this model. Images below.

If I haven’t mentioned it already, https://twitter.com/piplanter_bot IS the new twitter account for PiPlanter. Like last time, I’m using the tweepy library for python to handle all things twitter for the project. What I’m NOT using this time is Flickr. From a design point of view, it wasn’t worth it. It was too complicated and had…

I’m almost done with a very stable version of the Python code running the PiPlanter. There are many specific differences between this version of the python code and the version I wrote and implemented last summer, but the main one is that I tried to write functions for pretty much every task I wanted to…