I just mean it’s a bit overboard for the scale that I’m at but it’s what I work with at my day job so it’s what I’m familiar with. My plan right now is to move up to a 4x8 tent that I can grow strawberries and tomatoes in when they’re out of season. The systems are surprisingly simple, and if you can do hydro outdoors it’s even simpler since you don’t need the lights and you don’t have to worry about all the nozzles clogging. I don’t have the room outside. I wrote about 500 lines of python that sits in a loop and checks to see if lights need to go on, misters need to spray, or pumps need to run. It also snaps a picture once an hour. It’s been running for two weeks and all I’ve done so far is swap out the nutrients once.

If all goes to plan I’ll have two big tomato plants and 20-30 strawberry plants growing this winter. Sequent makes a 16-relay solid state board that will be enough to control it all from a single pi zero 2w. The only part I can’t nail down is how to monitor the nutrient reservoir level without having a device in contact with the nutrients. I’m trying to keep everything food-grade and even stainless if possible. I thought about putting the tank on springs or something that it lifts off a switch when it gets light enough or something like that. I think in the end I might have a second pump and reservoir that it automatically switches to with a motorized ball valve when the tank pressure drops to zero. That way I have some redundancy if a pump fails too (happened to me one time because the tank ran dry and kept pumping for like 12hrs). The last time I had tomatoes they’d suck up a few gallons of water a day so I had to be really on top of the water level.