- Overview
- Limitations
- Setting up the Pi
- Adding the timelase software
- Hardware pinouts used
- The Journey so far (Wiki)
- Roadmap (GitHub)
- Other stuff (Wiki)
Moving stuff about this is all out of date at the moment.
Being designed to read 5 sensors (4 one-wire and a serial CO2 monitor) and control 6 triggers meaning you can have up to 4 reptile vivariums or Deep Water Culture (DWC) buckets (Assuming they have the same envirnomental requirements), or maybe a much more complex single growing environment, requiring heating/cooling/dehumidfying/humidifying/venting in 3 zones and lighting across the whole environment... or a combination of any of that.
Currently, at it's core this is simply a controller for a heat pad and a light. Out of the box it will use a northern hemisphere concept of when summer is (solstice in June) and a 28.8°C high. You can also sign up for a DarkSky account which will let you configure your environment to a place on the earth. The project currently controls a single vivarium/DWC/germination station.
There is also a web interface which provides some feedback about how the temperature/humidity has been over the last 24 hours and graphs on what is being planned for the environment.
This app and everything in it are so pre-release that there isn't a version number yet, but it is affectionately referred to as Version 1 or 'the beast'. Version 2 is coming as a much smaller, modular version... I'll need a new name for it.
This application is not designed to be exposed to the internet and be secure.
You're stuck with temperatures in Centigrade for now and quite some time.
This app uses a solid state relay to control the lights and heat pad. The one I have found reasonbably cheaply is only rated at 2 amps per channel. Version 2 of the beast will handle 5A per channel.
There is only 1 sensor and 2 output triggers. Version 2 will allow up to 4 one-wire sensors and a serial CO2 sensor as well as up to 6 control triggers. The sensors supported are the DS18B20 for temerature, the DHT11, and DHT22 for temperature and humidity, and I'm adding the MH-Z19B for Carbon Dioxide.
There is only 1 'environment' modelled. This means the expects for heat, humidity and light are across all of the 'zones' you set up, so you cannot have a temperature plan for a root zone as a separate plan for the air zone. I do not expect this to change in the foreseable future. You can have separate triggers run heaters in different zones based on the sensors you assign to that zone but the expected temps will be the same, or at least will be based on this. I will add the ability to have a delta in the command structure so you can set things to be -2 degrees of the expected value for example.
The web interface is very limited and needs to be refreshed manually. This will change to automatically updating and allowing for some parameter control in the future.
The control (sensor definition, trigger logic and environmental modelling) is handled through a config file on the pi. This will move
to the web interface in time. If you can install everything then this will not be a problem for you. The config file is located at
/webroot/gStation/config_override.php.
Please see the Roadmap section for details on some of things that will come and fix some of these points.
There are a couple of assumptions if you want to use this stuff. First is that you have a bit of knowledge about what youre doing with regard to Installing an operating system on a raspberry pi (Zero in this case). It is also assumed that you have command line access to ssh (mac/linux for example) or know how to configure something like PuTTY on windows. How you write images to SD cards is also highly dependant on your operating system, but you can find out more information in the Raspian documentation and google is your friend.
- Burn the latest Raspian Lite image to an Micro/SD card (8GB is more than enough).
- Drop res/wpa_supplicant.conf from here into the boot disk
- Update that file with the details from your router
- Drop res/ssh file from here into the boot disk (or just create an empty file in the file system)
Boot the PI and log in (password will initally be raspberry).
rm -rf ~/.ssh/known_hosts
ssh pi@raspberrypi.local
Change the password and run the configurator.
passwd
sudo raspi-config
Make the folllowing changes.
- Network Options -> Hostname
- Interfacing options -> I2C -> yes
- Interfacing options -> Serial -> no to console, yes to hardware
- Exit (and do the reboot)
Next, log back in to the new hostname with the new password, then, update Raspian and install all the software packages we need.
sudo apt update -y
sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install -y apache2 php php-mbstring php-gd mariadb-server php-mysql git python3-dev python3-pip python3-pil i2c-tools python3-gpiozero wiringpi
sudo pip3 install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel Adafruit_DHT datetime adafruit-circuitpython-ssd1306 luma.oled
sudo phpenmod mysqli
The current version of WiringPi does not work proerly on the Pi 4B so upgrade it.
cd /tmp
wget https://project-downloads.drogon.net/wiringpi-latest.deb
sudo dpkg -i wiringpi-latest.deb
Download the pigpiod daemon to manage fast access to GPIO stuff (DHT22 for example)
cd /tmp
wget https://github.com/joan2937/pigpio/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
cd pigpio-master
make
sudo make install
sudo pigpiod
Download the drivers for the 1.5 inch OLED display
cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/rm-hull/luma.examples.git
cd luma.examples
sudo -H pip install -e .
Make the directories we require for our software
sudo mkdir /logs
sudo chown -R pi:www-data /logs
sudo chmod -R g+w /logs
sudo mkdir /webroot
Clone the software into its home.
cd /webroot
sudo git clone https://github.com/nigeljohnson73/gStation.git
sudo chown -R pi:www-data gStation
sudo chmod -R g+w gStation
Make and install the DHT22 access software
cd gStation/sh/dhtxx
gcc -Wall -pthread -o DHTXXD test_DHTXXD.c DHTXXD.c -lpigpiod_if2
mv DHTXXD ../
cd ../../
Set up MySQL with a secure root account.
sudo mysql --user=root < res/install.sql
Set up application database and user.
sudo mysql -uroot -pEarl1er2day < res/install_db.sql
Copy a simple installation config file so you can edit stuff
cp res/install_config.php config_override.php
You want to set up the GPIO pins for your sensors, so configure them in config_override.php and then
run the setup. The parameter supplied is the pin layout in the Pinout section below. When you
run this command it should print out the pins that can be used.
php sh/setup_gpio.php 2.1g
Install the heartbeat indicator LED controller which will install the LED on the correct LED pin setup above.
php sh/install_file.php res/install_boot_config.txt /boot/config.txt
# Clean with: php sh/clean_file.php /boot/config.txt \#GSTATION
sudo ln -s /webroot/gStation/res/ledbeat.service /etc/systemd/system
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable ledbeat
sudo systemctl start ledbeat
Move the new DHT11 overlay into the correct place.
sudo rm -f /boot/overlays/dht11.dtbo
sudo cp res/dht11.dtbo /boot/overlays
Move the webroot stuff around.
cd /var/www/
sudo mv html html_orig
sudo ln -s /webroot/gStation html
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Update the user login script so it has a pretty banner and stuff.
echo "source /webroot/gStation/res/bashrc" | tee -a ~/.bashrc
Configure the system to set up the GPIOs on boot in the rc.local file.
cat /etc/rc.local | grep -v 'exit 0' | sudo tee /etc/rc.local
echo ". /webroot/gStation/res/rc.local" | sudo tee -a /etc/rc.local
echo "exit 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/rc.local
Change the I2C refresh rate.
echo "dtparam=i2c_baudrate=1000000" | sudo tee -a /boot/config.txt
Update the crontab to have our update commands.
crontab -e
Add these lines:
1 0 * * * /usr/bin/php /webroot/gStation/sh/gstation_update.php > /tmp/gstation_update.txt 2>/dev/null
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /webroot/gStation/sh/gstation_tick.php > /tmp/gstation_tick.txt 2>/dev/null
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /webroot/gStation/gfx/generate_static_graphs.php > /dev/null 2>&1
Once you reboot, things should start kicking off in a few minutes and you should see the IP address you can connect to for the web interface appear on the OLED screen.
This is a project itself on github and is not quite ready for public release. These are the additional steps needed to get things working assuming you've completed the above setup.
First, go head over to Dropbox developer console and get the API key where you want to store your timelapse files.
Install the missing software packages
sudo apt install -y php-curl git imagemagick build-essential libv4l-dev libjpeg-dev cmake
Download, make and install the mjpeg streamer software
cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/jacksonliam/mjpg-streamer.git
cd mjpg-streamer/mjpg-streamer-experimental
make
sudo make install
Clone the gCam software into its home.
cd /webroot
sudo git clone https://github.com/nigeljohnson73/gCam.git
sudo chown -R pi:www-data gCam
sudo chmod -R g+w gCam
cd gCam
Set up application database and user.
sudo mysql -uroot -pEarl1er2day < res/install_db.sql
Copy a simple installation config file so you can edit stuff and put your Dropbox API key in.
cp res/install_config.php config_override.php
Configure the system to run our startup commands in the rc.local file.
cat /etc/rc.local | grep -v 'exit 0' | sudo tee /etc/rc.local
echo ". /webroot/gCam/res/rc.local" | sudo tee -a /etc/rc.local
echo "exit 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/rc.local
Install a "local" cam stream (you will need a dropbox API key in config_override.php)
php sh/lapse_create.php local localhost:8081/?action=stream start
Update the crontab to have our update commands.
crontab -e
Add these lines:
1 0 * * * /usr/bin/php /webroot/gCam/sh/_update.php > /tmp/gcam_update.txt 2>&1
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /webroot/gCam/sh/_tick.php > /tmp/gcam_tick.txt 2>&1
More detailed information is available including voltage tolerances and resistor values can be found on the Hardware Pinout page in the wiki, but here is the lasted version.
setupGpio(): runtime_version = 2.1g
setupGpio(): sensor_pin_1 = 4
setupGpio(): sensor_pin_2 = 17
setupGpio(): sensor_pin_3 = 7
setupGpio(): sensor_pin_4 = 22
setupGpio(): trigger_pin_1 = 18
setupGpio(): trigger_pin_2 = 23
setupGpio(): trigger_pin_3 = 24
setupGpio(): trigger_pin_4 = 25
setupGpio(): trigger_pin_5 = 8
setupGpio(): trigger_pin_6 = 11
setupGpio(): button_pin = 10
setupGpio(): led_pin = 9
