OpenFarm aims to be an automated farm control solution for scheduling lighting, heating and ventilation, watering, PH & nutrient balancing, and complete sensor monitoring (temperature, humidity, soil moisture levels, etc.) using RISC-V and Arduino hardware and opensource software.

Thats the goal, pure and simple.

The Hardware:

Star64 Model-A SBC - Master Controller

• MIPI touch screen LCD (control/stats)
• PHP webscript (control/stats)
• Graphene DB (raw stats)

Ardruino UNO R4 - Growing Enclosure Controller

• Relays for equipment control
• Realtime stats sender (to graphene on master)
• Network enabled to avoid long SPI/I2C links
• 1 unit per enclosure for simplicity

Growing Enclosure(s)

• Lightweight aluminum structure and canvas/plastic skin
• Ventalliation fans / electric heating
• Water distiller
• Liquid pumps for water and nutrients
• Lighting
• Sensors to monitor temperature / humidity / Soil PH and moisture levels

The Software:

Star64 running Gentoo Linux

• Enlightenment/EFL based GUI
• NGINX webserver with PHP webscript
• Graphene realtime DB for stats
• SQLITE DB for dated long term stats with user defined observation and result fields

Introduction:

Farming can be accomplished by anyone and everywhere; however, not everyone is a good farmer :). Automating everything you can surrounding farming seems like a noble goal. Eyes on monitoring will always be required to judge when pruning or other maintenance tasks should be preformed. Camera(s) setup to monitor growth/overgrowth needs to be considered to alert the user to action. Standardized growing plans for each crop and their results should be used as guidelines but not set in stone as each growing environment will be different.