Keeping track of lab conditions

One of my goals for Project Calorie Fountain is that it be easy to build and simple to operate, so I should probably avoid requiring any expensive and/or complicated gadgetry in the mix, if at all possible.

But that doesn’t mean my lab has to be gadget-free. On the contrary. The more I can track and understand the variables in my setup, the better I’ll be able to diagnose problems as they arise, and steer the project toward simpler crops and methods.

The question is: what data needs to be tracked, and how?

I’ve never really grown anything before (other than a few kitchen herbs in an Aerogarden) but I have been watching YouTube videos on the subject for years. Unfortunately, the YouTube algorithm doesn’t reward creatives for sharing rigorous data. In fact, it probably punishes them, since most people probably aren’t interested in the really nerdy details of pH balance, EC drift, and humidity control. So while I know these things are all important, I don’t really know much about them.

A few years ago, I got curious about why some rooms in my house were warmer/colder than others, so I wired up some temperature and humidity sensors and placed them throughout the house. I built each one around a WiFi-enabled microcontroller (ESP8266) and then set up a Raspberry Pi server to receive their data. So I am now the proud owner of 4 continuous years worth of temperature and humidity data from 8 different locations around my house, in 15-minute increments.

I’ve never needed all that data, but I can see how having a history like that of conditions in my lab would be invaluable. So rather than buy a hand-held probe that measure these things and track it all in a spreadsheet, I think I’m going to build a new version of my household system, but with a few more sensors on the probes. And I can probably use the same Raspberry Pi as the collection server too.

But instead of doing the heavy lifting of designing the more ambitous sensor pack myself, I’m going to leverage some existing plans and code libraries put together by those who have gone before me. This one seems to have all the parts I want, although I probably won’t bother with a digital display. I’ll just pull up data from the collection server when I need to check on things.

From what I've seen, I should probably include temperature, CO2, and relative humidity for the room, and pH, EC (electrical conductivity), and temperature for the hydroponic solution. (Tell me in the comments if you think that's overkill or if I've missed something important.)

There are probably going to be more things to work out on the data collection front, but this feels like enough to get started.