Purple Haze

Vidhara As soon as the seeds arrived, I put them in a glass of distilled water at 25 °C and let them float. All of them had germinated by the next day (26.10) and were planted in soil. Pleasantly surprised by the SPEED of germination. I've built a fairly complex monitoring and alarm system with Home Assistant. The screenshots are from my own dashboard. Happy to make it open source if people are interested. MONITORING • Stage-based targets: I choose the growth stage, and the targets for temperature, RH, VPD, CO₂, PPFD and light hours switch automatically. Every value shows green, yellow or red depending on how close it is to target. • Climate: an AC Infinity controller with a probe in the tent measures temperature, humidity, VPD and CO². A dehumidifier on a smart plug keeps the room humidity down. • Light: a DIY PAR meter (ESP32 + AS7341 spectral sensor), calibrated against a reference meter, within about 2 % at two light levels. It shows live PPFD, the real DLI per day and the light spectrum in 8 bands. The DLI target is calculated from PPFD × light hours, so the two never contradict each other. • Power: every device is on a metering plug, so I see watts, kWh and € per device and for the whole grow. AUTOMATIONS • CO₂ dosing: CO₂ comes from a bottle through a solenoid valve on a smart plug. Each cycle measures CO₂, doses a pulse sized to reach the target, waits for the gas to mix, and learns how much each second of gas actually raised the level. A manual button gives a timed dose that stops on its own. • CO₂ safety: no dosing at night. The valve is closed if it stays open too long, above a hard CO₂ limit, and after every system restart. Three pulses in a row without a rise → dosing stops and I get a "tank empty?" alarm. • Light hours: the light-hours target follows the growth stage. • Light cross-check: the system learns the tent's power draw with lights on and off, which gives the lamp's own wattage. One button learns PPFD per watt at the current lamp height. Together they check the PAR meter against the lamp. • Self-repair: if a smart plug drops off the network for 3 minutes, it's reconnected automatically. ALARMS • Push notifications to my phone for an empty CO₂ tank, CO₂ too high, a stuck valve, or a device offline for 10 minutes. • Critical alarms sound even when the phone is on silent. • Each alarm is sent once, followed by an "all clear" when it's fixed. The little ones seem to be growing FAST! Cheers ;)