Automation

BUILDING YOUR OWN  iGROW:

Raised Bed Garden – The easiest and your first implementation of iGrow should be a raised bed vegetable garden. The primary reason for this is that the ease of learning to grow vegetables lends to learning about the iGrow technology. Vegetables also allow you a greater room for error and are a great starting point. Once you have mastered vegetables, you can move to using it for chicken, rabbit and fish. Here is our page of instructions to build your own raised bed garden. You can also purchase these from Amazon on our Amazon Store Referral page.  We do not sell these items ourselves, but we have purchased and use them. When you use the link supplied on these pages, you are also supporting ALEF  Research Corporation as we are an Amazon affiliate.

Water –  Water is the fundamental resource needed for life and growth. If water usage and/or recycling is important to you, then iGrow with a waist level raised bed garden is the perfect solution. A waist level raised bed allow for the excess water to be collected via gravity drip or routed to a storage tank. iGrow has  sensor module options that allow it to detect the level of water available, the temperature and pH of the water. iGrow can even warn you if the water fall below certain levels you have preset in your configuration. This is an especially good option for remote area without any water service or local water pond. As water levels fall in the tank or if you decide to purge the tank, iGrow can open the main water values and refill the tank  directly or fill through watering the plants and allowing  water collection back into the water storage tank.

Electricity –  Electronics run on electricity. iGrow does require electricity and a WiFi network. It does not require internet access. However, if you are offsite and want to control your iGrow remotely, you will need internet access and a static IP address. If you site is remote and there is no electricity available, there are solar module options available fro iGrow that cost less than $200 in materials.

Raspberry Pi & Electronics –  Raspberry Pi is a $50 tiny desktop computer motherboard. It is the size of a credit card, has WiFi, Video & GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output)  capabilities and runs on 5 volts. It is the brain of iGrow. It runs the Raspbian operating system which is opensource and free. it operates in a User friendly Node-Red environment. It comes with Node-Red option modules that allow you to customize it to your needs.  The basic image of the Operating System, Node Red installation with video can be downloaded from our GitHub repository as well as any modules you would like to use. The Raspberry Pi setup page has a list of all modules and electronic components with links to Amazon for purchase.