LED Growers Forum

Nice one Godzilla... feels so close to being ready now, you must be aching to soak those beans!!!
the very best of electronic karma to you mate!

sorry guys didn't update in a few days but that's cos theres a lot been going on and wrestling with one issue in particular. 3 white widow auto seeds have been soaking and popped out yesterday.
since its cold weather though, im starting them in a propagator to give them a decent chance. they are going well in that thing, I will give them a few days more then put them in the chamber to grow.



a few days ago I setup the system in the grow area, strapped the control box up on to the wall and the robot on the floor. getting it up and running was not as straightforward as I hope though...
first thing to get stuck on was network cable, seemed the length Id wanted to run into the room just wouldn't work between the pi and the router (other eqpt was working but lossy). In the end it seemed easier to go wifi, so that's what I did, adding a nano wifi adaptor to the USB hub. That was the first of the install problems solved (or so I thought).
Second was that there was flickering in the lights, the grow light and the white lights. since I was testing before with regular bulbs, I didn't "see" the issue. but with the led's that can turn on and off fast, they didn't ride it out, so the issue was a bit of a surprise
Got to it with a bit of debug, looks like Fotek relay's only part work at 5V control voltage. They are rated 3V up but 5V just wont hold the relay steady ON. I jacked up the drive voltage to 7.5 and the lighting is now switching on/off OK and no flicker at all. After some head scratching I rerouted the high side supply of the level shifter driving those relays to the arduino-bot's motor voltage (7.5V). Thankfully it was not so hard once the problem was understood.

So far so good I started the timelapse running and left it be to see how it got on. Seems all went well until something went wrong six hours later and the pi was left in a weird state of coma. Over the last couple days I have been trying to get to the bottom of that one still. adding more debug code to try and work out what happens when it crashes, modifying behaviour, changing HW setup...
whats happened is that the HD is no longer on the hub, but direct to the pi. HD and Pi share a USB supply and are not connected at 5V to anyone else. Also I have increased the min memory limit according to
http://stevenhickson.blogspot.co.uk/201 ... ashes.html

it did run perfectly stable on the bench before so had to try revert things, removed the wifi adaptor and instead made use of a couple of powerline networking units I had in the garage. If it is a memory low issue, then the USB wifi adaptor wont help things - it will consume more memory than just a straight lan connection, and draw more power. this is the latest thinking anyway.

its been running happy for some hours already, lets see how it is in the morn... hope I got the fix this time round, need to have it stable cos in a few days it'll be "showtime"

Best of luck to you, man! As always, make it work, then make it work better!

LEDDWCRigger wrote:Best of luck to you, man! As always, make it work, then make it work better!

That's a great mantra for success!

WE WANT SHOWTIME!!!

I dunno how you have the patience for all this, Godzilla! That kit looks awesome... just can't wait to see it all do it's stuff!

Happy New Year as well mate!

cheers guys!
has been a bit frustrating last few days, I summarised quite a bit of the last few days work, but had to go back and forth changing one thing then another and seeing if it holds steady or not.
good news so far, the thing has run something like 20hrs now without an issue, so might well have been related to adding the wifi adaptor in there.
the adaptor itself is the maplin nano, there lots of people that have used it against the pi with luck as well but I knew from the start running a wifi adaptor puts some memory and processor load on the pi and I wanted to keep it off the pi. that's why I ran the long cable in as first choice. still the powerline networking adaptors seems to be doing a good job.

tracked the last log messages in the last fails, they were just during / after running the convert command to manipulate the large jpg coming off the main camera, adding the timestamp graphic. makes sense that this task would require a bunch of memory in an instant, so this could have been when it hit a dangerous low and stalled.

20+ hrs is the longest continuous time its managed by a long shot (post install), so I think we might be good now. good thing en route solving this issue at least I also enabled the pi's watchdog so if it has any less drastic version of a OS crash, it should reboot itself ;
http://blog.ricardoarturocabral.com/201 ... ng-on.html

its not necc. that the wifi adaptor is bad btw, its just that with everything else going on, the pi probably ran out of resource. there is a bunch of stuff like the SAMBA server and other background processes running in this setup. In case any one else goes with the wifi, id recommend making the minimum memory limit adjustment I mentioned in the last post, and also perhaps implement a nice reboot when memory is running low ;
http://raspberrypihobbyist.blogspot.co. ... eboot.html

when I re set up the pi after the SD card crash episode, I skipped my earlier step with installing VNC server , the remote desktop server. this was thinking forward so now since Im "done", I've disabled the pi from booting into the desktop to conserve resources, and no need for remote desktop as I can make a SSH connection and run any commands, reconfigure etc.

looking good... if it carries on like this I'll soon declare it ready for action

then I need to tweak the lighting so it looks good in the camera's, mylar makes it difficult on the cameras. may even need to stick a white backdrop behind, not sure, but that wont take long to experiment and get right. should be able to start the thing running for real, maybe Wednesday I think.

you have a bit of room there, I'm wondering if mylar is that important with the Helios... Autoberry just seems to have a load of black acoustic foam on his walls, and he gets nice results!

You are going to find that good pictures with green-negative grow lighting are a major pain in the ass to accomplish. You will need either a powerful flash or perhaps something that can switch the LEDs off and turn on a couple of strategically-placed fluorescents for a better picture, mylar or not. The sheer saturation of blue and red makes it a pain in the ass for histograms and exposure balance, since those are weighted much like our vision - to green light.

well said LEDDWCRigger!
I think that's exactly the problem, the light in there at the moment is not great for pictures. Thankfully I just need to rearrange the lighting, white and grow lighting switch from two separate relays and are controlled by the system, so just need to find a good combo of lamps to aim at target, and configure a little bit. I just had to leave this on the to do list until the crashing issue was solved.

noted the system crashed last night after 55 hours ish. This time it was good since I could debug a bit more and saw that the USB hub seemed to have locked up. even after a reboot of the pi and re-insertion of the hub the connected devices were not accessible, only repowering the hub fixed it. I have heard that some hubs can give stability issues also, so this will be the next thing to be swapped out now.
I think the backpowering and memory were still important before since there has been a big improvement. Two suspects at the moment actually, one of the cameras seemed to be stuck with the blue "in action" light jammed on when it crashed, so hub and camera are suspect. Ill switch out the hub first then re-test to see if the camera goes into that state again. At least these are extra camera's so wont affect the main vid.

godzilla wrote:well said LEDDWCRigger!
I think that's exactly the problem, the light in there at the moment is not great for pictures. Thankfully I just need to rearrange the lighting, white and grow lighting switch from two separate relays and are controlled by the system, so just need to find a good combo of lamps to aim at target, and configure a little bit. I just had to leave this on the to do list until the crashing issue was solved.

noted the system crashed last night after 55 hours ish. This time it was good since I could debug a bit more and saw that the USB hub seemed to have locked up. even after a reboot of the pi and re-insertion of the hub the connected devices were not accessible, only repowering the hub fixed it. I have heard that some hubs can give stability issues also, so this will be the next thing to be swapped out now.
I think the backpowering and memory were still important before since there has been a big improvement. Two suspects at the moment actually, one of the cameras seemed to be stuck with the blue "in action" light jammed on when it crashed, so hub and camera are suspect. Ill switch out the hub first then re-test to see if the camera goes into that state again. At least these are extra camera's so wont affect the main vid.

Looking forward to updates on this project

hi folks!! just a quick update today. things been pretty good since the new usb hub went in, no further crashes. I've also implemented a twice daily reboot at convenient times between captures, so things stay reasonably fresh. with that and the other safeguards, I think it stands a good chance of making it through the grow without too much spanner work.
the little plants are still in the propagator, be ready in a few days to go in a pot and under the cameras, want to give them a good start for this one.

only couple things to tidy up, one is that the tilt servo needs a clean or change, after all the thousands of cycles of soak testing it went through, I think the pot and wiper arm could do with a clean since there is some jitter every now and then, which shows through in the timelapse vid as a vertical shaking. shouldn't be too much hassle to sort that one.