LED panels for DIY home farming projects

Nice! I did something similar (as a proof of concept only) for tropical fish. This is something that we're not fully exploiting.

Yes and makes a very easy educational project with kids (I have two), it makes even the simplest arduino sketch do something "useful" irl^^
Haha yeah I never thought of the fish use case before starting this project, but a friend has been using those for his fish for over a year now, he said it was great for that purpose.

Our POC went one further - probably no help for plants, but for topical (and esp. marine) fish it's a game-changer. I just don't have the budget to work on one at the moment.

The idea is to use those 65535 colour LED chips (damned if I can remember the part number offhand) to make the lights shift from deep blue (moonlight) through sunrise, daylight and back through sunset into moonlit evening over a 24 hour photoperiod.

I'm sure there will be commercial ones that do this already but I haven't seen anyone doing this with their fish tanks. I'm a keen study of animal behaviour and (unlike us) they obey what nature tells them. Some fish, marine in particularly but freshwater too, require this day-night (and even seasonal) cycles to breed. And even if you're not breeding (temperature is another variable here) this will bring out the best in your fishes not just in terms of colour but also keep them healthier than a simple timer or (as my ex. does) switch them on an off as the mood takes her.

There are some excellent libraries to drive those LEDs so you only need to worry about the RTC - which is largely fire and forget, but the cheap ones lose time so be careful there. If you did come up with something for this, I could design a PCB for the project - even perhaps have the whole thing assembled in China so it only needs to be programmed.

Might be something for Matt (@diy_perks) to consider?

@marcdraco Yeah one of the advantage of that is that you can do progressive sunrise/sunset which is better than just abrupt on/off for plants and fish too I guess, with plant you can clearly see that when the light turns off in an instant the plant will "sweat".
For the RTC part the cheapest (but wifi dependent) is just to get something like an esp32 with wifi and use NTP to ask and re-set the time every X hours/days.

I also provide an open-source firmware (for esp32, currently on the work to deal with all other esp models) that can do all kind of things, like auto-watering and weight sensor (and others), the plan being to use the latter as indicator for watering (work in progress), because soil moisture sensors tend to not be very reliable over time, while a good ol' load cell under the pot can stay accurate for a long time, and you don't really need perfect absolute values, just a "typical" min/max.

Haha yeah the controller already exists, it's part of SuperGreenTomato/SuperGreenLab (I do that too), but it's a less DIY solution, and focuses on a specific type of plant 😅. Here with PicoFarmLED I wanted to make something cheaper as an arduino accessory with the complete 3d printable construction set, for example I'm working on this as a "print&cut&plug&play" desktop home farm (that doubles as a desktop lamp): OnShape link (check the assembly tab).

And there also this complete laser-cut box: OnShape link  (I attached a pic of this box with plexiglass doors)

Yeah I'd love to get in touch with Matt (@diy_perks) to talk about all this:)

I don't know where Matt gets his ideas, but I can certainly get behind that one.

I did an incubator (for birds/reptiles) a lot of years ago but the controller was simple. These days the heating could be controlled by a PID system.

We'll have to see what comes out of it, but I'd be excited to have one myself. I love Open Source.

Sounds good! Sorry for the delay I had a few things to sort out here:/
Do you have an email we could communicate with?
Mine: constantin@picofarmled.com