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• Home Page Has Moved

  Michael Ratcliffe • 10/19/2015 at 17:51 • 0 comments

  See my other Blog over at Element14:

  http://www.element14.com/community/community/design-challenges/vertical-farming/blog/2015/09/13/automated-green-house-blogs-main-page
  

  All Updates will be published there.

• The Test Greenhouse

  Michael Ratcliffe • 09/21/2015 at 07:31 • 0 comments

  Here is a Quick Youtube Walkaround the Greenhouse used for proof's of concepts:

• More Background

  Michael Ratcliffe • 09/21/2015 at 07:28 • 0 comments

  about me: Graduated with a Degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Masters in Electrical Engineering currently finishing my gap year and taking some time to design an automated greenhouse and small allotment type garden to provide a yearlong hassle free supply of food and a test bed for novel nutrient sourcing Aquaponics grow system.

  Until the age of 21 I would consider myself a computer-phoebe, using my laptop mainly as a coffee matt, Then I saw a tutor flying a Quadcopter and got hooked! with a lot of help from the tutor [Bob Mackin of Lancaster university] I overcame the phobia and five years later I have automated and optimized many of the time consuming jobs on the farm and house, moving my area of expertise from mechanical engineering to control system engineering [Its much more Fun].

  Shameless Plug

  I am looking for a PhD/Job in automation and control systems, preferably in regard to farming but open to offers. Willing to commute/relocate worldwide for the right position.

  Take a look at the website below for CV, Reference and examples of work:

  www.MichaelRatcliffe.com

  Want to Fund me ? I am in need of the many electronics components [drop me an message].

  Take a look at some of my other projects:
  

  >Automated Green House Blog's Home Page [Updated: 21/9/2015 < British Format]

• Licences

  Michael Ratcliffe • 09/21/2015 at 07:25 • 0 comments

  All Codes/Scrips are hosted at: www.MichaelRatcliffe.com/projects

  [Will be updated before the 22/9/2015]

  All of the content of this blog is writen by myself including the scrips/codes and design tutorials unless specificaly stated otherwise.
  

  Everything is released as Copy Left:

  Use it as you wish, please reference me if you use any large parts of my work [Michael Ratcliffe] Modify it, make it better etc. but as always you do so at your own risk.

  
  

  Scripts/codes under GNU:
  

  This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify

  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by

  the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or

  (at your option) any later version.

  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,

  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of

  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the

  GNU General Public License for more details.

  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License

  along with this program. If not, see .

• Familiarising yourself with the Feeders

  Michael Ratcliffe • 09/21/2015 at 07:09 • 0 comments

  Here is a How To use the Products:

• Fish Feeding Basics

  Michael Ratcliffe • 09/21/2015 at 07:00 • 0 comments

  Feeding Fish Is a very time consuming task, taking skilled operators to visit sites multiple times a day and is prone to human error or implementation of inefficient feeding routines to save time. A computer could perform this task day in day out repeatable, efficiently and without human interaction, saving time, food and increasing yields from a system drastically.

  If the potential benefits are so good, then why has no one already done this? I can only give you my opinion on this. The task of feeding fish is a complicated one, many variables and environmental factors effect the feeding of fish [see below] and fish farming is a pretty boring subject.
  

  As you can see from the chart above the variables are numerous and sometimes hard to measure. Luckily a lot of these can be defined/measured and represented mathematical.

  Feed Spacing/Timings: The optimum time between feeding of fish depends on the size of the stomach of the fish, when they are young they require feeding regularly, decreasing as they grow larger.

  Feed Amount: The amount in percent body weight to feed the fish daily is largley influenced by the water temperature and the age of the fish. These are the inputs needed for the open loop controller. The vision based feedback does not need to know this, it will use the rate of food consumption to mimic a skilled human feeder.

  Feed Chemistry: the percent of protein you fed fish is related to the age of the fish and the water temperatures.
  

  A Note On DO: Dissolved Oxygen measurements are expensive, measuring probes need constant calibration and as such we will be assuming the pond has adequate oxygenation for growing fish. Spreading the feed serving over the day will spread the demand for DO over the day also. So in short, feeding multiple times a day decrease the peak demands for dissolved oxygen of the system. [this is a good thing]

  Useful Links for the Automated Feeders:

  >DIY Feeder Mechanical Proportion

  >Control Box How-to

  Open-Loop

  Work Done:

  >Code for Feed Amount vs Temperature

  >Wiring Diagram

  >How-to measure the feed-rate of your feeder

  >Sourced housing for final product prototype

  Work To Do:

  >Implement gps to allow feed timings implementation

  >Build into the housing

  >Increase type of fish from just Tilapia

  Camera Feed-Back

  Work Done:

  >Proved that food can be identified by the camera and OpenCv on Raspberry Pi

  >Proved that Feed Delivery Rate can be changed by PWM

  Work to Do:

  >Control loop to keep constant amount of food in pond, making note of duty cycle

  >Test at what time during decrease in PWM the fish are full for optimum growth

  >Implement a simpler arduino version for the IBC Aquaponic growers out there

• Human Urine and Hydroponics [Working Proof]

  Michael Ratcliffe • 09/21/2015 at 06:22 • 0 comments

  There is a lot of people hungry in the world today this could be reduced by the application of technology. Lots of the main areas of food shortages have lots of sunlight and a surprising abundance of well water [even the sahara desert] the limiting factor is poor nutrient sources and soil. Hmm I have been growing with Aquaponics for years now, problem solved?

  Maybe not, in Aquaponics the food to feed the fish is relatively expensive for a person surviving on two dollars a day. What else can we use as a nutrient source instead of fish food, human pee will be a good source [its free, easily available]. It is possible, maybe considered disgusting in the west, but if you are hungry your definition of disgusting changes pretty quickly.

  The problem with using urine is that a person will never output more nutrients than he eats, so we are really only reducing the nutrient cycle waste and not having a real input to it. It’s a great start but we need to add to this solution. What is a plentiful and free nutrient source? [Later blogs will cover this]

  Here is a quick video showing a variate of plants growing from a fish less aquaponics unit instead dosed with pasteurised human urine, it was made as a basic proof of concept, no real scientific data here yet. The good data will be coming from the growing competition.

  I was unable to have a full spectrum carried out on the proof of concept human urine test and lacked a decent standard I could compare too, but here are some basic measurements compared to a natural healthy pond:

  There is little concrete data I can pull from these readings apart from:

  >I really need to keep a closer eye on the PH of my system [looks like yet another broken probe, these things are making me poor]

  >The carbon water Filter is working well and stopping chlorine from entering the system

  For the competition grow [starting in two weeks] there will be two identical systems for comparison and access to a full spectrum analysis of the water samples. One pure human urine and the other a commercial nutrient, from this comparison we should be able to make more confident proof's.

  There will be a few blogs to carry on this topic, mainly:

  >What is in Human urine and why it is a good idea to use it

  >How and Why to pasteurise/sterilise the urine before use

  >Automated self learning Doser [also suited to general hydroponics]

  >The layout for the final grow test, what we will be measuring and why

• Self Optimising Automated Arduino Nutrient Doser

  Michael Ratcliffe • 09/21/2015 at 06:08 • 14 comments

  This Blog is about making a nutrient dosing system for hydroponics that is plug and play, I didnt quite get it to the full stage of plug and play with this version. But it is almost there. Because the change of nutrient strength of our systems can be modelled as a linear system with respect to nutrient delivery it should be possible to implement a very simple self tuning control system based on the system model. Why a Self Learning system:
  

  >System only needs to be roughly defined
  

  >Adapt for pump wear
  

  >Adapt for a change in nutrient source strength
  

  >Plug and Play for a wide variate of Systems
  

  >No problem dealing with the Lag between delivery and stable reading
  

  I made this control system with Urine as a nutrient source and because the concentration of urine can vary we need a system that can take this into account. A traditional PID controller will struggle here [Or at least I would struggle to implement a good one] because of the large lag between input and output measurement due to the mixing of nutrients in the system [Tank mixing+Grow beds fill+drain time]. It will also work for traditional liquid fertalizer.

  Main Variables in the script
  

  >Tank size in L

  >Nutient Strength [Stick with 100 or follow hints in the code]
  

  >Pump Size [L.Second-1]
  

  Variables input by LCD Screen:
  

  >EC Set point
  

  >Probe Calibration
  

  The only real choices hardware wise:
  

  Pump sizing
  

  Although this is a self learning system we still need to choose a nutrient pump of a suitable size so the pumping interval is quite large to reduce the effect of pump priming and post pumping discharge [Fancy words for the pump acts weirdly when we first turn it on and just after we turn it off].
  

  I have not included the maths here to fine tune your pump size because it doesnt matter that much, just pick a pump with a flow rate of less than 10% of your main tank volume per minute.

  EC Probe
  

  Using the Cheap DIY Probe: Pick a plug as a probe that isnt used in your country [currently supports EU and USA two prong]
  

  [This will also work with a comercial ec probe, just change the getec() to your Ec meter]

  Pinout:

  
  

  Code:

  /*
     ElCheapo Arduino EC-PPM measurments and Nutrient Doser Script
     
     This scrip uses a common USA two prong plug and a 1Kohm Resistor to measure the EC/PPM of a Aquaponics/Hydroponics Sytem.
     Then It Increases the Nutrient content until the set point is reached 
     It Also Estimates the EC of the nutrient Source [For when you are using Urine/ unknown Nutrient EC]
    
     
     28/8/2015  Michael Ratcliffe  Mike@MichaelRatcliffe.com
       
       
            This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
      it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
      the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
      (at your option) any later version.
  
  
      This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
      but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
      MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
      GNU General Public License for more details.
  
  
      You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
      along with this program.  If not, see .
      
      Parts:
      -Arduino - Uno/Mega
      -Standard American two prong plug 
      -1 kohm resistor
      -DS18B20 Waterproof Temperature Sensor
      -FluidPump [Smaller is better];
      
      Limitations: 
      -Cell Constant [K] and ECSetpoint must be less than 5.0 or it will Mess with the way we save values in EEPROM
      -A reset will change your set point and kell constant slightly, but not to a great extent
      -EEPROM seems to survive a reflash, so changing values in the code will not change them in the flashed software. you will need to do it via the LCD
      
      See www.MichaelRatcliffe.com/Projects for a Pinout and user guide or consult the Zip you got this code from
   
   */
  
  
  //************************** Libraries Needed To Compile The Script [See Read me In Download] ***************//
  // Both below Library are custom ones [ SEE READ ME In Downloaded Zip If You Dont Know how To install] Use them or add a pull up resistor to the temp...

  Read more »

• When Things Go Wrong: NFT vs Media Bed Hydroponics

  Michael Ratcliffe • 09/20/2015 at 18:08 • 0 comments

  The last test comparison has come to an end and it gave a chance to simulate a water system failure. The video below shows the effects of water loss for 24 hours both immediately and after a 48 hour period for NFT and media beds. You may be surprised at how fast the plants recover from the drought.

  The humidity misters were still operational keeping the relative humidity at 60-70%, so results may vary depending on air humidity, temperature and sun intensity. If it is in a well stocked aquaponics system you will need to act fast to oxygenate the water tank the fish are in, and reduce feeding to stop ammonia spikes until you have fixed the water flow problem.

• Update Code For Three Dollar EC PPM Meter for MCU [Arduino]

  Michael Ratcliffe • 09/19/2015 at 19:29 • 3 comments

  This code is a slight update of the last one, updated:
  

  >Better Uptime Counter
  

  >LCD Shield
  

  >New Pin out Diagram
  

  >Restart Protected Calibration Details
  

  >EU and US Plug Calibrated Probe
  

  Also a quick update to the code so the calibration value will survive a power cut, we are storing the cell constant K [a float] in EEPROM as a scaled int, so there may be a slight change in the value following a reboot [but that small it wont make much difference].

  Cell Constants
  

  I Recommend Calibrating your probe but if that is not an option at this time the following cell constants [K] will give a good estimated readout:
  

  EU plug: K= 1.76
  

  US Plug K= 2.88
  

  Calibration
  

  If it needs instructions to be operated someone engineered it wrong, the lcd should explain itself to you at start up. If you are still stuck watch the youtube video to see how I calibrate it.
  

  Calibrate with an EC of about 50% your maximum expected reading for best results.
  

  The NEW Pinout:
  

  
  

  /*
     ElCheapo Arduino EC-PPM measurments
    
     This scrip uses a common USA two prong plug and a 47Kohm Resistor to measure the EC/PPM of a Aquaponics/Hydroponics Sytem.
     You could modift this code to Measure other liquids if you change the resitor and values at the top of the code.
    
     This Program will give you a temperature based feed controller. See Read me in download file for more info.
    
     28/8/2015  Michael Ratcliffe  Mike@MichaelRatcliffe.com
      
      
            This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
      it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
      the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
      (at your option) any later version.
   
   
      This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
      but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
      MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
      GNU General Public License for more details.
   
   
      You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
      along with this program.  If not, see .
     
      Parts:
      -Arduino - Uno/Mega
      -Standard American two prong plug
      -1 kohm resistor
      -DS18B20 Waterproof Temperature Sensor
     
      Limitations:
      -Cell Constant [K]  must be less than 5.0 or it will Mess with the way we save values in EEPROM
      -A reset will change your kell constant slightly, but not to a great extent
      -EEPROM seems to survive a reflash, so changing values in the code will not change them in the flashed software. you will need to do it via the LCD
     
      See www.MichaelRatcliffe.com/Projects for a Pinout and user guide or consult the Zip you got this code from
   
  */
   
   
  //************************** Libraries Needed To Compile The Script [See Read me In Download] ***************//
  // Both below Library are custom ones [ SEE READ ME In Downloaded Zip If You Dont Know how To install] Use them or add a pull up resistor to the temp probe
   
   
  #include <OneWire.h>
  #include <DallasTemperature.h>
  #include <LiquidCrystal.h> //Standard LCD Lbrary
  #include <EEPROM.h> //Standard EEPROM Library
   
   
   
   
  //************************* User Defined Variables ********************************************************//
   
   
  //##################################################################################
  //-----------  Do not Replace R1 with a resistor lower than 300 ohms    ------------
  //##################################################################################
   
   
  int R1= 1000;
  int Ra=25; //Resitance of Digital Pin, 25 ohms for mega/uno
  int ECPin= A15;
  int ECGround=A14;
  int ECPower =A11;
   
   
  //************************* User Defined Variables ********************************************************//
   
   
  float CalibrationEC=1.38; //EC value of Calibration solution is s/cm
   
   
  //*********** Converting to ppm [Learn to use EC it is much better**************//
  // Hana      [USA]         PPMconverion:   0.5
  // Eutech    [EU]          PPMconversion:  0.64
  //Tranchen   [Australia]   PPMconversion:  0.7
  // Why didnt anyone standardise this?
   
   
  float PPMconversion=0.5;
   
   
  //*************Compensating for temperature ************************************//...

  Read more »

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