PiPlanter 2 | Interfacing a Mikroelektronika CANSPI and an Arduino

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 follows:

There are two parts of Arduino code, the sender and the receiver. The following code sends a sample piece of CAN data. Attach a potentiometer to A0, and twist it to see the differences in data in the receive code:

The following prints all CAN data received to the serial monitor:

Twist the potentiometer and see the change in data to see that it’s all working:

Thanks for reading!

PiPlanter 2 | DIY Lite Version Release!

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 I’ve done to till this point in one concise post.

This does NOT mean I’m done working on future versions of the PiPlanter. I’ll hopefully write another post stating goals for the future sometime soon. Now onto the build tutorial.


 

The Hardware

 

First, the hardware of the project. A good place to start would be the parts list:

In the previous version of the PiPlanter, I didn’t have a concrete parts list for the project. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep this spreadsheet updated if the project changes. A lot of these components are mix and match, you could use pretty much any pump (The math for volumetric pumping is done with this pump) or any tubing or any power supply that can do 12v and 5v. A computer PSU would work great as well.

This is the hookup guide for the system:

(Thanks to tamps for the help!)

The two sets of header blocks are to be replaced by the moisture sensors, and the motor replaced with the pump.

For a physical configuration, I’ve found through multiple times doing this that mounting it on a wire rack works the best as seen here:

Edit (10/19/2014) Here is the same group of plants two months later without any direct human interaction. They grew from the light in the window and used up all of the water in the reservoir which was totally filled before I left.

To distribute the water to the plants, attach the vinyl tubing to the outflow of the pump and seal off the other end of the outflow tube. Run the tubing along the plants and drill holes wherever you’d like the water to exit.

You’ll also need to install the camera module in the Pi and point it wherever you’d like the frame of the photo to be.

 

The Software

As a preface, I’d like to at first say that this software was written entirely by me. I’ve never had any formal training in programming of any kind, so if there are obvious flaws with my code please let me know. That being said, I’ve found that this system is very effective and has worked for me and kept my plants alive for months.

All of this runs off of a base install of raspian on a raspberry pi model b.

There three major parts to the software. First, the prerequisites:

You’ll need to enable SPI on your Pi in order to use the MCP3008 ADC. Do this by running the following commands:

Comment out the spi-bcm2708 line so it looks like this:

Then run this to make it more permanent.

And finally reboot your Pi with:

Then the php code that renders the pChart graph. More details for installing pChart here and officially here.

And now the star of the show, the python script:

Before running, make sure you make the following changes to the script:

You’ll need set up access to twitter API’s, seen here. You’ll need to input your information about your twitter app into into 331-334 of this script.

You’ll need to input information about your YouTube account on line 429

On line 473 you’ll need to input your mysql information.

 

Output Demos

The PiPlanter is very connected. It renders graphs of data, takes images and renders timelapse videos.

Here’s a standard tweet showing the plants:

Here’s a tweet showing a day’s worth of data in  a  graph render:

Here’s a tweet showing a week’s worth of data in a graph render:

Here’s a timelapse video of three days:

Follow @PiPlanter_Bot for updates on my plants.

That’s pretty much it! Please feel free to modify this code for any use you’d like.

All of my research on this project can be found here.

Thanks for reading, and please leave a comment if you like my work!

PiPlanter 2 | Updating Dependencies

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.

PiPlanter 2 | Adding Youtube Upload Functionality

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:

It should remind you a lot of “TryTweet” from the main version of the PiPlanter.

 

PiPlanter 2 | Moving again

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.

PiPlanter 2 | Solving Broken Pipe Errors [Errno 32] in Tweepy

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 too many things that could go wrong for me to continue using it. Twitter is more than capable of hosting images, and tweepy has a very simple method of passing these images to twitter. Recently I moved the whole setup indoors and mounted it all onto a shelf seen here and it came with a set of strange problems.

Long story short, what I think happened was that since I moved them to a different location, the complexity of the images increased, causing an increase in the size of the images themselves. A broken pipe error implies that the entirety of the package sent to twitter wasn’t sent, causing the tweet not to go through. I first started to suspect this problem after seeing this:

 

The graphs were going through just fine, but images were seeming to have a hard time. You can’t tell from this photo, but those tweets are hours apart as opposed to the 20 minutes they are supposed to be. Once I started having this problem, I bit the bullet and integrated logging into my project which produced this log:

Hours and hours of failed tweets due to “[Errno 32] Broken pipe”. I tried a lot of things, I figured out that it was the size of the images after seeing this:

Photos that were simple in nature had no problem being sent. After scaling the image size down, I’ve had absolutely no problem sending tweets.


If you are tweeting images with tweepy in python and getting intermediate Broken pipe errors, decrease the size of your image.
Thanks for reading.

PiPlanter 2 | Progress Update

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 do, and made each routine much more modular instead of one long line after line block to do each day. This took significantly longer to do (thus the lack of updates, sorry) but is much more expandable going forward. Below is the new version of the code, but by no means am I an expert programmer. The following code seems to work very well for what I want it to do.

Note the distinct lack of comments. I will put out a much more polished version of the code when it’s done. Before I move onto things like a web UI etc, I would like to do a few more things with this standalone version. The above version renders videos into time lapses, I would like to be able to upload those videos somewhere, hopefully youtube. I would also like to be able to email the log file to the user daily, which should be easier than uploading videos to youtube.

The script that renders the MySQL data into a graph is the following, it on the other hand has not changed much at all since last year and is still the best method to render graphs like I want to:

Here are some photos of the current setup, it hasn’t changed much since last time:

Thank you very much for reading.

PiPlanter 2 | New Code Version / Temporary Setup

Hello! Here are some images of the new grow setup:

and here is the working version of the code:

I’ll do a much more thorough post when the project is further along. For those playing along at home, you can see that I’ve totally re-written the code for this new version. So far, it has much less functionality but much more stability and flexibility.