Cuply - Hydroponics Greenhouse Cabinet Powered by Django Channels and Arduino - Overview
I'm in the process of making a greenhouse out of a glass cabinet that sits on our balcony. Inside it, there's to be a plethora of sensors and actuators hooked up to Arduino Due microcontroller, which is in turn connected to an old Raspberry Pi. The software stack is Django with Channels in the back-end, and React with some D3 in the front-end. It was a project long time in development, and this series of articles will explore it from the inception to the latest product.
- Overview ← You are here
- Hardware
- Back-end
- Front-end
- Conclusion
Since we started looking to buy an apartment back in 2018, we had in mind a south-facing balcony. In the end, we were lucky enough to buy just such an apartment and, even though the balcony is small, we got it to become a special corner of our living space. It doesn't have much, but you can sit there and enjoy the view of the treeline across, day and evening, have a drink or even a meal on the foldable table we installed. The previous owners had a water butt set up to pick up the drain water and a set of flowering plants that thrived on it. We wanted herbs we could use in the kitchen so we had to control the water quality. Because the balcony is small, we opted to try a vertical set-up instead of a horizontal one, and having a hydroponic loop made sense. Fast forward to 2022. We have an automated system, although that's still just the beginning.
Even though sunlight is abundant on south-facing balconies in the northern hemisphere, if there are no outside obstructions, Ireland is not ideal. To control the temperature better, we opted for a glass greenhouse to look nice and make use of the greenhouse effect. For that, we had to buy a glass cabinet because building one was hardly an option. No space for us to do it at home, and the hackerspace we know is not really near enough to reach conveniently without our own transport.
Whoever opts to build such a thing by themselves, by all means, go for it. Custom builds will always utilize the available space better.
We could've become members of a nearby community garden. It's looking lovely this year. But we'd definitely be too lazy to devote ourselves to maintaining it so the balcony greenhouse will have to do. And, to be fair, setting up hydroponics is more fun.
Of course, there are some drawbacks. The space is limited in general and we'll see how viable the plants will be (the pots are rather small), but it's an experiment driven project that is inconspicuous enough, but also decorative and useful; it enriches our balcony's environment, creates a separation from the neighbours and might yield fragrant herbs. Not to mention that it's a great opportunity to have a hobby.
In the future articles, I'll go into more detail on how the thing was made. For now, it's a hydroponic loop that functions between two tanks. The lower one pumps the water into the upper one, and the gravity takes care of the rest. Because of the size, only six plants are able to be inside the cabinet. The other things are nifty add-ons that just make the whole thing a bit high-tech and agro-informatics driven. Whatever the case, I'll open-source it after I finish the articles and have a working cabinet, so whoever wants to explore a bit and implement a similar solution in their place, they're more than welcome to use it.