1/2 inch bolts arrived, you know what that means....

Or maybe you dont. It means that I could finally get to work on the rest of the frame for the grow chamber. Needless to say this was not an easy task. I had to undo almost every bolt a few times to get things to "line" up. When it was all said it done. It looked like this:

I placed the grow lights and tub in the bottom to check the fit.

With the shell on top, its starting to look like a food computer.

A little shout out to MIT media labs as I was watching how to build a food computer inside my food computer.

As you can see Elon really enjoys spending time on the project. Even his pet racoon joined in the fun. Hopefully that will be the only pest to come near this Food Computer.

Elon and I spent some time debugging the motherboard.

I loaded the Arduino up with code, and started checking the voltage around the protoboard. Elon and I thought we were in good shape. If you notice the mistake in the picture above your quick.

Did you see it? 

I will tell you. The red and black wire to the power supply were placed on the wrong terminals. My LED's would not fire when connected, but for some reason my fans continued to work. Remembering back to my college days, LED's only work in one direction and the Fan's working, well that was mistake number two in my late night soldering job of the fan connector. Lesson learned, fixed and we move on.

Debugging the fan and LED's required us to open the USB Serial port monitor in the Arduino development application. Once we loaded the gro-microcontroller ino file, we can see the serial payload streaming out about once a second. The actuators and sensor have acronyms that you can follow in the steps at the end of the MIT media lab motherboard build instructions.

You can enter commands too, this is how I determined that the LED's were not getting the proper voltages. Swapping Red and Black on the power supply, the room lit up!

Next came time with the Raspberry Pi. There are no real instructions past the arduino step. You have just entered into "the code documents itself land".  The arduino is powered by the Raspberry Pi USB port and the RPi communicates with the Arduino over that same wire (/dev/ttyACM0).

The Raspberry Pi image provided by MIT media labs has some quirks to it.
1. It assumes you have connected the Adafruit LCD touch screen board to the Rpi. I did not. Reason being,.... I think $50 is too much when you control this Food Computer via a desktop application over an IP connection. This means that when the image loads, the HDMI output never enters into Xwindows. No biggy. Time to SSH into the Rpi and have a look around.

2. After spending some time looking around, I discovered the gro-daemon.sh and gro-daemon.py. The gro-daemon.sh is the old launch method for the raspberry pi growing REST api and interaction with the arduino. The new method to launch the service is gro-daemon.py. But here is the trick. It is already running. MIT used the "upstart" services to auto launch the python script at start of day. I wasted a few hours trying to figure out this error, only to discover I was launching a second instance of the daemon and it was conflicting for access.

So... figured it out, its already running, that is great. I modified the server-ip.txt with the ip address of the Rpi and began tracking down the gro-ui.


On git hub I found the installer, installed the file and launched the application. Username "plantos", Password "plantos", and I was in.

I noticed the "Window Open" indicator does not appear to be working as I had the switch in my hand while watching the screen. I confirmed it is conveyed over the Arduino... so. sounds like another debug session is in order.


Overall the software is very cool. There are a few plants to pick from, lettuce, strawberries, tomatoes... all of which Elon has said he is excited to try.

We are getting very close here to starting the "Grow". However...... I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT GROWING plants or how to start.

If anyone knows of a Wiki or a good resource let me know, as I need to figure it out before Elon catches wind that Daddy is not the oracle of all knowledge.

Again, its late.... and I should be heading to bed. I am really enjoying this build.

P.S. I chatted with a few people from MIT Media labs, there is some grumblings about the EC and PH sensors in the FC 1.0 version of the Build of Materials. They have been trying other versions from other companies looking for a more reliable source. I wish  I could offer more info or advice here, but I need to do some research as to the importance of EC and PH to plant growing.


Till next time. Keep Building, Learning and "Growing".