I have been working on this project for the past week or so now but its nowhere near ready yet.
The basic idea is to monitor your plants environment by measuring some variables. At this point Im only recording temperature and humidity but it should be quite easy to include PH and EC as well. These measurements are then linked to photos taken with a cheap web cam. The end result is a time-lapse video that can be generated for any interval together with measurement chart. The script also recognizes if the image was taken while the lamps were off so there is an option to exclude these images from the time-lapse.
So lets say you want a time-lapse video for the past month. After setting the range the PHP script generates the video together with the measurement charts. Now you find out that something interesting happened somewhere during this time period, e.g. some plant problem, and you can specify a new period, a week or a day for example. Now you get a more accurate video from that time period as well as measurements with shorter intervals. So in a way you can zoom in and out in time and possibly track the cause of the problem.
The gear used in this example setup can be bought for less than 30$ and the script should be working on any basic web space with MySql and PHP. I have used a basic webcam with gray filter and usb dongle called TEMPer Hum. On windows environment neither of these require any drives. I havent calibrated the humidity reading, but its really easy to calibrate the measurements. The video is actually not a real video but sequence of JPG images. This makes it possible to generate the video dynamically for the given timeframe.
I have attached a screenshot and a a link to some sample .html files that you can download to see how it looks like in action. Just download the .zip file and extract it and open the .html files with a browser. You cant change the time interval because its not connected to any database. The first example shows you a period of 4 days night time images excluded and the second one is there to show you what happens when you turn of your lights and fan at the same time: the temperature drops as expected while the humidity gets higher for a while because cold air cant hold as much water as warm does.
The next step would include PH and EC values to the measurements. It also shouldnt be too hard to automagically adjust the nutrient and acidity levels with dosage pumps.
Ideas and feedback are really welcome. Im planning to release this for free when its little bit further in development.
Examples: examples.zip
The basic idea is to monitor your plants environment by measuring some variables. At this point Im only recording temperature and humidity but it should be quite easy to include PH and EC as well. These measurements are then linked to photos taken with a cheap web cam. The end result is a time-lapse video that can be generated for any interval together with measurement chart. The script also recognizes if the image was taken while the lamps were off so there is an option to exclude these images from the time-lapse.
So lets say you want a time-lapse video for the past month. After setting the range the PHP script generates the video together with the measurement charts. Now you find out that something interesting happened somewhere during this time period, e.g. some plant problem, and you can specify a new period, a week or a day for example. Now you get a more accurate video from that time period as well as measurements with shorter intervals. So in a way you can zoom in and out in time and possibly track the cause of the problem.
The gear used in this example setup can be bought for less than 30$ and the script should be working on any basic web space with MySql and PHP. I have used a basic webcam with gray filter and usb dongle called TEMPer Hum. On windows environment neither of these require any drives. I havent calibrated the humidity reading, but its really easy to calibrate the measurements. The video is actually not a real video but sequence of JPG images. This makes it possible to generate the video dynamically for the given timeframe.
I have attached a screenshot and a a link to some sample .html files that you can download to see how it looks like in action. Just download the .zip file and extract it and open the .html files with a browser. You cant change the time interval because its not connected to any database. The first example shows you a period of 4 days night time images excluded and the second one is there to show you what happens when you turn of your lights and fan at the same time: the temperature drops as expected while the humidity gets higher for a while because cold air cant hold as much water as warm does.
The next step would include PH and EC values to the measurements. It also shouldnt be too hard to automagically adjust the nutrient and acidity levels with dosage pumps.
Ideas and feedback are really welcome. Im planning to release this for free when its little bit further in development.
Examples: examples.zip
