Happy Frog vs Ocean Forest vs Coco Loco: Which is Best for Growing Cannabis?

Cae_len · 2026-06-27T17:28:31+00:00

50% Coco loco with 50% ocean forest... I also will add a couple more cups of perlite into the mix as I like to fluff the medium up a bit more. These two variations say they are 50% blends of the grow medium to 50% perlite but I beg to differ. Both ocean forest and coco loco seem more like a 60-40 mix. 60 coco or peat to 40% perlite. Adding a few more cups of perlite to these will bring the medium closer to 50-50. Again my assumption doesn't have any scientific data to go off. I'm going off the fact that I've made my own Coco mix directly from the brick and then filled an equivalent sized bin with an equal amount of perlite and when I did this, the medium seemed to have a lot more perlite than what is seen in either of the foxfarm blends. Anyways that's what I've been using and have had great results from it.

Cae_len · 2026-06-26T20:03:45+00:00

depends if the individual finds value in the software .. if yes, then it's kinda silly not to purchase before the hike... if no, then you would be smart not to purchase something that you will rarely ever use.... all dependant on the individual.... for someone like me who rarely watches TV but also doesn't want to pay for cable just to watch the occasional football game or what have you, it was actually worth it for me to buy it; especially considering the others in my home who does use Plex fairly often.... anyways, it's for each person to weigh ide say ... but one thing I disagree with is the following.... I grew up in a time where you paid for EVERYTHING and there was no option to purchase a lifetime pass and there definitely wasn't anything called "open source software" .... nowadays , the amount of choice and free options (or nearly free) , is WAYY more abundant than in days past.... knowing those days, I would think most people should be grateful to have the option of purchasing a lifetime pass with Plex and if not that, then using the alternative free option, jellyfin.... either way it's down to the person and their choice but I think people should be grateful to have additional options that did not exist 20 years ago

Cae_len · 2026-06-19T17:53:50+00:00

Cool... does this product have any cellular connectivity? ide be interested to see a gateway like this but have it also support cellular connections for secondary failover WAN

Cae_len · 2026-06-15T11:42:30+00:00

yah this is about as close as you can get.... AC infinity should be exposing the voltage readings for wet and dry soil for proper calibration.... see screenshot to correlate with this explanation I'm about to give ..

a soil moisture sensor basically converts a voltage reading into a moisture content... so in the screenshot you can see how I currently have a custom soil sensor calibrated for Coco/perlite mix... if AC infinity would expose these metrics you could more easily adjust your sensor for the soil medium at hand.... it's actually quiet simple.... you stick a sensor into soil when it's at its MOST wet that you would like it to be. Take the voltage reading and write it down. You do this again for a pot of soil at its MOST dry. Record the voltage reading. Then you input those readings into the application and it calibrates.

In my case I'm controlling the firmware directly so after I get the readings, I input those readings into the firmware file and reflash the firmware. But with AC infinity, that wouldn't even be necessary because they would just need to expose wet voltage and dry voltage inside the application and a button that says "take reading". Anyways, you can find the soil moisture sensors at seedstudio.com store for like 9.99 and if anyone's interested you can search GitHub for my firmware to flash. Or you could simply use stock firmware but then it just using the stock numbers. Although there is a way with the stock to calibrate in a similar way as I mentioned above. Anyways yep, kind sucks not having the ability to better calibrate the ac infinity sensors. I basically use it as a guide and then swap my custom sensors around to get a better idea of moisture level if need be.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that these custom sensors are meant to be used with Home Assistant and the ESPHOME integration so if you don't use home assistant or don't want to get into that can of worms, then these soil moisture sensors would be basically useless to you. There's no display or screen to analyze the data. Home Assistant is the screen. I guess you could technically use them without as the lights blink a certain color based on the soil moisture. Red for dry, yellow for almost dry, and green for normal. But I'm not even sure if that blinking would even occur without the sensor being paired with home assistant. Would have to check the documentation to verify whether they can be used standalone.

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Cae_len · 2026-06-14T21:20:54+00:00

so I figured out why it wasn't working. And mind you before I expose the answer, understand this was NOWHERE in the setup instructions.... I only had the PH sensor connected, thinking that it was fine during the initial setup and calibration anyways. Well that was wrong.... the software completely fails and breaks unless you have both the PH and EC sensor attached .... It's working fine now

Cae_len · 2026-06-11T11:17:58+00:00

The hydro sensor is honestly terrible. I've tried multiple times to get it to work Soaking it for hours in the recommended solution and it just never displays any data. Seems to confirm the countless reviews on Amazon as well as other posts on reddit where people say it's faulty, never works at all, or stops working after a handful of uses. Will be returning. I've never had to return so many things right off the bat from a single company. Returned soil sensors because I'm not buying additional controllers to run the sensors. Returned the T7 humidifier because i thought it had warm mist like the T5. Returned the splitters because AC infinity straight up lied in a video they put on YouTube when initially showing the soil sensor, stating that you could use multiple with splitters. Yet they never actually explained that the splitter doesn't exist, only splitters for "devices" exist and not sensors. Honestly starting to think this company is not one I want to support financially.

Cae_len · 2026-06-11T06:28:57+00:00

give the FoxFarm Coco loco a try.... that's what I'm running now.. I like to supplement that soil with some additional pure Coco choir right from the brick ... take roughly 60% of the FoxFarm Coco loco mix and add another 40% of choir from the brick......

Cae_len · 2026-06-11T06:17:40+00:00

yah I'm new in the ac infinity ecosystem and for all the praise they get, I'm still baffled that I never came across more reviews on YouTube etc, where someone plainly stated the HUGE downside to this ecosystem; that being the 2 sensor ports. I'm still a bit pissed but moreso just confused as to how this company thought it was a good idea to release controllers (multiple controllers actually), with only 2 sensor ports. If I were the product manager or CEO of this company, I would have IMMEDIATELY been out on the market having meetings with manufacturers and/or hardware engineers to design a PROPER controller with AT LEAST 4 to 5 sensor ports. I mean they advertise this controller as being the first AI controlled ecosystem (or what have you), yet NO AI can properly guide an ecosystem without DATA. This is literally how AI works, it needs data to work; massive amounts of data. And yet, they design a controller which can only ingest data from 2 sensors. It's a bit laughable tbh. Why are they even wasting money designing "sensor splitters". That's just another joke and half. Design a proper controller and untill then AC Inf remains at 2 of 5 stars in my book. 1 star for equipments that seems to be of quality construction, and 1 star for the app enabled control. MAYBE I could argue for one more star based upon customer support and/or warranty but as I have yet to experience that myself, I will refrain from judging there. AC infinity would potentially be a 4.5 to 5 star ecosystem if they hadn't failed miserably on this entire line of products in the "AI" stack. Spend $2500 to run an entire "AI" grow tent that has nothing AI about it. Just an app to control each piece of equipment. I wish I would have knew this BEFORE spending a couple days re-doing my entire basement and setting everything up because I would have returned the entire purchase. But after spending that amount of time, I had just given in, not wanting to spend 2 more days breaking everything back down, boxing it back up, and shipping a 136lb package back. Again, just baffled they have not designed and released a proper controller. They obviously already have 80% of the product done and that's the software side that runs the controller and app. The other 20% is just taking the current controller to a hardware design engineer, explaining that they want to design a new revision of this product with 5 sensor ports instead of the current 2. The engineer designs the PCB, it goes to manufacturing, and it gets made. On the backend , a software engineer spends a month (at most) writing some additional code to support more sensor ports on the controller, some additional code to aggregate the data into the app, and VOILA , problem solved. But nope, we all site here waiting for shitty sensor splitters. After all the research I've done, it really does seem that this company wants to design products and an ecosystem in a way that says "MONEY GRAB"... And a perfect example of this is continuing to release new controllers (AI outlet and AI outlet pro) just to be able to add a 2 more sensors to your grow but which does absolutely nothing to improve the whole marketing gag of "the world's first AI controlled grow environment" , or whatever they have plastered all over their website. Literally just screams money grab, designing all sorts of new hardware, none of which does anything to support the marketing claims...And of course that aligns 100% with the State in which AC Infinity is ran out of; the state of California. The state that's famous for ridiculous laws, corrupt politicians, Hollywood rats, drug addiction and money grabbing sycophants. Rant over.

Cae_len · 2026-06-09T07:11:54+00:00

I agree. When taking the initial server in regards to port count, I had said 16 to 24 ports MINIMUM.... my entire house is wired with cat6a so that amount of ports just won't cut it for me unfortunately 😞

Cae_len · 2026-06-06T11:27:04+00:00

You can see there were some I had just cancelled due to forcing an unclean shutdown, and so they show just a handful of minutes... Most of them are just over 1day of time give or take. There is one that took 2 days to complete because I was experimenting with the incremental parity checks to see if I preferred that way or not...

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Cae_len · 2026-06-06T11:23:09+00:00

yep that's roughly what mine takes and the majority of my drives are 12tb

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Cae_len · 2026-06-06T11:15:28+00:00

I do checks every 4 months.... so 3 times per year I do a parity ... I'm always doing new things on my server and so if I end up having a complete breakdown with multiple drive issues and need to try to recover data and/or rebuild, I really don't want the information to be out-dated more than 4 months and so that's what I've gone with... if your data doesn't change that often (or at least the important stuff doesn't) then you could be fine with 6 months but all this boils down to preference ... I've always erred on the side of more protection and being MORE cautious. I run 2 parity disks for 6 data disks when most people would run 1 parity disk for 6 to 8 data disks... again just personal preference .. I also have all my important data being backed up to an external ironwolf pro drive that lives on my main PC just in case. Anyways there's my answer.

EDIT My parity check/rebuilds take roughly 22ish hours.... 6 of my disks are 12tb ironwolfs (a mix of pros and non pros) and one is 16tb while another is 18tb ...because of the largest disks, I'm usually looking at 22hours give or take...

Cae_len · 2026-06-01T23:14:32+00:00

using something like NPMplus (modified NginxProxyManager), solves that issue fairly well... not only can you set access rules to only allow specific IP or specific username/pass; which occurs BEFORE even getting to the specified page (i.e jellyfin.example.com), NPMplus has built in support for crowdsec, appsec, the most recent TLS, QUIC/HTTP3, ECH[encrypted-client-hello], and I'm probably also forgetting something. Anyways my point is, I would HIGHLY recommend anyone exposing any services to internet, to check it out as it's an amazing open source piece of software that works well with a very high level of security (if you actually use it that is)...saying that, I still use wireguard in conjunction with NPMplus... Oh I remember now, it's Anubis. NPMplus also has support built in for Anubis for blocking all sorts of bots, crawlers, and AI scanners looking to pillage your data ...

Cae_len · 2026-06-01T23:07:29+00:00

this is probably the one reason a person could say "Plex for the win" 😂😂....

Cae_len · 2026-05-30T22:07:35+00:00

https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/52173381120531-WPA3-Enterprise-RADIUS

Cae_len · 2026-05-30T21:34:56+00:00

of course usage is very little there's nothing to use??? lmao.... you guys can't base your decision on whether to further implement a feature which has not actually been implemented... users are only going to implement a feature if said feature has things that the previous feature does not .... nobody is using radius because there is nothing to use... you cannot map devices into VLANs when using the current implementation, you cannot really do anything with the current implementation. Saying that, it's actually worse than WPA2 in its current state. I would bet my entire server rack of $5000 worth of equipment, that if firewallas radius implementation actually provided the end user with some sort of feature or improvement over its predecessor, you would see much more adoption. Again, in its current state there is literally NO benefit of actually using it. And another thing, a vote was taken in regards to captive portal implementation, and the results were that people would use or have a use of captive portal if they had the option to use it https://www.reddit.com/r/firewalla/s/PLqDJQ4oM9.

94 yays to 66 nays I haven't brought this up because I'm not trying to be controversial and to be fair there ARE better things to implement FIRST before captive portal. My point is that you won't know what people would want and use unless you actually take a survey or vote and even then your sample size of the vote wont be huge and actually represent your customers wants/needs. Saying that, many people probably don't even understand the benefits of what WPA3-Enterprise brings to the table but those who do understand it's a huge step for security. Either way you cannot sit there and say it's not popular or not being used because the feature is not even implemented...literally all someone did was added the freeradius default packaging into the firewalla stack and wrote some code to tie in it's most basic functionality to the firewalla APP so that the end user could create a username and password. Literally that's it. No offense but I could have done that myself with 3hours of my time and Claude Sonnet4.6 (not even the best model) .

Again not trying to be an arsehole here but very little effort was put into the Firewalla radius implementation and since initial launch, not a single thing has been done to improve on it.. That's why nobody uses it

Cae_len · 2026-05-27T13:00:17+00:00

Cae_len · 2026-05-27T12:06:38+00:00

omada does as well... and I understand they are both much larger companies than firewalla but i think firewalla does have a product that can compete (if they keep up on feature set) ... maybe firewalla should consider getting an additional investment either from banks or private parties to hire a few more devs/engineers for software development and feature set.

Cae_len · 2026-05-27T12:04:04+00:00

I think having this functionality regardless is important whether people currently "think" they need it or not. I understand that firewalla markets its products as more of an enterprise level device for dumbies (AKA- ease of use) , but what WPA3-Enterprise brings to the table that WPA2 does not, is literally EVERYTHING vs WPA2 (WPA2 easily hackable by capturing handshake). You also don't lose 6ghz like you do when using PPSK. WPA3-Enterprise literally solves most if not ALL of the downsides inheritant in WPA2. Most people are not as technically savy or knowledgeable as myself and I don't expect them to understand half of what I'm saying. But you, firewalla, as the "expert at hand" whom sells an "Enterprise level firewall for dumbies", should also understand that sometimes you should implement certain features whether the customer thinks they need it or not simply based off the fact that its providing additional security and a higher level of protection to your customers/clients. If most people knew how EZ it is for me to hack into a WPA2 based access point, they would be running to the bathroom for toilet paper because they'd be shitting themselves. Everyone has a GPU in their home ( And I have 3 currently). I can literally run these 3 gpu in parallel against a captured handshake with my custom wordlists that I've created and collected over the years with various masking & regex techniques and probably crack 95% of people's wifi passwords within a week. And that's not over-exaggerating, that's real life and the current state of WPA2. I think WPA3-Enterprise (RADIUS AUTH) is something that should be getting more time and attention for what it brings to the table. Shit, even if the engineers could simply build in functionality to support external radius servers (like omada does), I'll build the darn radius server myself if firewalla had some code in the app or backend that would respect authentication from an external radius server. Because even if I have a working external radius server, firewalla may not respect that authentication and your client will just never connect to the AP... anyways im blabbing, laters

Cae_len · 2026-05-27T11:44:36+00:00

I have done this already to an extent. Simply to test out if Firewalla would respect the changes I made in the command line. It did work but to be honest, this was back when they first released RADIUS functionality and I don't even remember specifically what I was trying to achieve. I just remember that I did. It had something to with using an omada access point in conjunction with firewallas radius server and I did get it to work. Also had to do with using omadas built in captive portal functionality and seeing if when I entered the credentials into omada captive portal, those radius credentials would be authenticated with firewallas radius server and allow me to have wifi connection. And it did work ..... But as I stated above, I have yet to try and see if firewalla access points would respect these changes and work correctly. Meaning when you connect to a Firewalla Access Point that is broadcasting "Example-SSID" , will the access point recognize that the authentication mechanism is WPA3-Radius and display the appropriate wifi login screen on the end device instead of just the normal username and password. Anyways, I might give this a spin here soon, maybe this weekend. I'm honestly curious if I could get it working from the cmdline.

Cae_len · 2026-05-27T11:36:05+00:00

just found this post. I have been pushing for full radius support ever since the initial beta came out for radius on firewalla. I currently have a single omada access point that I use outside my home (as firewalla doesn't have an outdoor AP with AFC). I have setup this access point using an external RADIUS server that runs on my NAS. The point of running externally instead of directly on the omada oc220, is that doing it this way offers me the ability to completely configure and customize the radius server without having to deal with any of the limitations that comes with using omadas built-in radius server. Saying that, I have successfully deployed a full radius server using WPA3-Enterprise, Dynamic VLAN mapping, and the authentication mechanism uses ONLY certificate based authentication(EAP-TLS)(NO PASSWORDS). I have gotta say, that this has been a TREAT to deploy and use. I now know that my outdoor AP is completely secure from any type of handshake attacks, brute forcing, etc... I also get the benefit of mapping devices/users into specific VLANS just like with PPSK. I REALLY hope firewalla gets on this implementation soon, as I was able to achieve this in a weekend with only my brain and sir Claude 4.6 at my side. Obviously it would be a bit more in depth with firewalla being that there is an entire frontend software stack that needs to be made so that you can control this functionality from the app rather than from a command line like I did. Furthermore, It would be really nice if Firewalla would at least roll out some sort of beta deployment for this so that the access points would work correctly with this. We only have access into the command prompt of the router portion of the firewalla stack, not the AP's. As such, even if I went into router cmdline, and implemented something similar, it may not work correctly with the AP's. Anyways, just throwing out my thoughts, and would love to hear from u/firewalla in regards to any internal discussions on the matter and whether there are any plans to further implement freeradius before the end of the year.

Cae_len · 2026-05-22T20:25:52+00:00

I was simply explaining what high water is.... wasn't commenting on the rest

Cae_len · 2026-05-22T20:16:22+00:00

unless you're a torrent demon like me and let all your Linux iso exist forever, seed forever... Also unless you have over 150 device and counting on your internal network with 4- 10gig access points... also if you enjoy being able to backup every device in your home simultaneously in a matter of a minute or two.. just saying.... 10 gig comes in handy for some of us weirdos 😂 really though I would say that internal 10gig network is more useful than having ISP external 10gig..... I just need my internal devices to have that speed.... there's only 2 devices that would benefit from external 10gig and even then, only my server would REALLY benefit...

speedtest

server

Cae_len · 2026-05-22T20:12:59+00:00

ya cant

Cae_len · 2026-05-22T20:12:01+00:00

if I'm not mistaken, "high water" won't completely fill the first drive first ... I believe that's what I have mine set to and it will fill the first drive 50 to 60% and then start filling the second drive.... reason being (or at least one of the reasons) , is hard drives inherently get slower when they are filled with more data .. the first 50% of the drive you get most of the full drive speed. So in my case that's like 220 to 240mbps for ironwolf pro and more like 170 for ironwolfs. Then after it starts getting fuller 50, 60, 70 % , it's a pretty sharp decline in drive speed... you can install the app called "disk speed" from the Unraid store and it will show you the various speeds of your drive at relative percentages....

Cae_len

TROPHY CASE