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MAGICBOX

The MagicBox project is a set of hardware and software tools organized together that provides an open indoor growing platform. The system aims to assist home growers in monitoring, scheduling and fine tuning of their growing operations.

IMPORTANT: Please keep in mind this project is very experimental and not suited yet for production. More to read in the DISCLAIMER section below.

dashboard Magicbox dashboard page

How it works?

Background

While ago when I started indoor growing, I realized that one important part of the success of operations relies on technology. Lights, air quality and environmental parameters have to be managed carefully to mimic nature in a way your plants benefit of the best environment for them to grow efficiently.

At the beginning like many growers, I bought all the usual equiments separatelly and managed them through a mess of cables, socket multipliers and schedulers. It worked well but was irritating the software engineer inside me, by the lack of centralized control and monitoring.

So I recycled an old power inverter enclosure with 8 female 220V integrated plugs and I put every components I needed in it. Power plugs are managed by 5v relays through GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi 4 computer board. I also connected DHT11 temperature and humidity sensors with home-made USB cables and connectors to monitor the environmental parameters. All the 5V components are powered by a Meanwell power supply also embedded in the case.

case Recycled power inverter enclosure

NB: Using an inverter case as I do is absolutely not required to run Magicbox, I just find it convenient. The concept of using RPi GPIO to control high voltage plugs through 5V relay is applicable to many other similar setups.

On the software side, it uses a Ruby on Rails backend app that manages the whole system. From rooms, devices and sensors, to minimal grow management and scenario-driven orchestration, the web interface provides all the tools needed to manage an indoor garden.

That said, Magicbox is currently not a seed-to-sale software designed to handle an instrustrial indoor growing operation. It does not provide any tools to manage tracability, retail stocks and client files. It perfectly fits with small home growing installation and for nerdy growers who like DIY.

Features

  • Multiple rooms and devices management: organize several grow rooms with their own devices and sensors all connected through GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi
  • Condition-based growing scenarios: you can build your own growing scenarios with user defined conditions to schedule and optimize your growing environment
  • Multiple grows management: follow multiple grows simultaneously, move subjects (usually plants) from grow to grow, room to room, track them with QR codes and post detailed observations about them
  • Growing journal, calendar, todos, notifications and events give you a global view of operations
  • Support for pictures from mobile devices and webcams (unstable)
  • Data, charts and statictics help you to fine tune your setup along the way
  • TODO: Role-based users management: organize your team, share and communicate to increase your productivity
  • TODO: RESTful API with token-based auth (and iOS app coming with it)

Limitations

  • Rooms/scenarios only support 1 device per device type
  • Magicbox is not a seed-to-sale software : no stocks, retail, client, etc. management included
  • 3 minutes minimum scheduling: each process cycle is triggered by a cron task running every 3 minutes
  • Ruby on Rails framework can be resource-intensive, do not expect too much performance from it on a Raspberry Pi

Feature goals

  • More collaborative features (journal replies thread, notifications, sharing)
  • Better devices management, including camera support
  • Use AI to fine tune the environmental parameters and device orchestration
  • Polish to API to make it secure and ready for production
  • Dockerize the project to ease deployment if possible (regarding GPIO and related stuff), or provide a ready-to-use image for Raspberry Pi architecture

Disclamer

This project is relatively experimental and do not offer any garantee to run without issue with your particular setup. If you rely on Magicbox project to manage an indoor grow, do it at your own risk. Vegetal life is very sensitive and software/hardware failures can have tragic consequenses on it, so please experiment with care.

You'll certainly need to put your hands in the dirt to make it run properly, so do not expect from it to work out of the box. Also, the project is subject to major changes at any moment, even if I do my best to keep things smooth.

Requirements

Hardware

  • Raspberry Pi 4 - 4 GB RAM recommended (should work on Pi 3, but slow)
  • 8+ channels 5V relay module
  • 220V AC
  • 5V AC - 10 AMPS recommended
  • DHT11 temperature/humidity sensor

Software

  • Raspbian 10 buster (Raspberry Pi OS - Kernel 5.4)
  • Ruby 2.7.2
  • Rails 5.2.2

Skills and tools

  • Soldering, and tools coming with it
  • Being a little confortable with electronic in general
  • Mastering Linux is recommended, being confortable with Ruby (and Rails) is a must

Installation

Dependencies

sudo apt-get update -q
sudo apt-get install -qy procps curl ca-certificates gnupg2 build-essential postgresql postgresql-contrib libpq-dev git nodejs apt-utils libmagickcore-dev libmagickwand-dev libxml2 libxslt ruby-dev zlib1g-dev liblzma-dev --no-install-recommends

Install Yarn

sudo curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y yarn

Create magicbox user

sudo adduser --disabled-password --gecos "" magicbox

Install RVM

sudo gpg2 --keyserver hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3 7D2BAF1CF37B13E2069D6956105BD0E739499BDB
sudo curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | sudo bash -s stable
echo "source /usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm" | sudo tee -a /home/magicbox/.bashrc
sudo usermod -a -G rvm magicbox

Install Ruby

source /usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm
rvm install ruby-2.7.2

Setup PostgreSQL

This will create a dedicated Postgres user named magicbox. It is recommended to change the password, do not forget to use the same in the .env file we will create later (DATABASE_PASSWORD env var).

sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE ROLE magicbox WITH LOGIN PASSWORD 'magicbox';"
sudo -u postgres psql -c "ALTER ROLE magicbox SUPERUSER CREATEROLE CREATEDB REPLICATION;"

Setup Ruby

Log as magicbox user:

sudo su magicbox

Select the ruby version to use as default:

rvm use ruby-2.7.2 --default

Get sources

Clone source from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/nark/magicbox.git

Jump into the project directory

cd magicbox/

All the following commands will be executed inside the magicbox/ directory.

Setup environment variables

Create a .env file to setup some environment variables:

nano .env

Fill it with the following:

DATABASE_HOST=127.0.0.1
DATABASE_NAME=magicbox_production
DATABASE_USER=magicbox
DATABASE_PASSWORD=magicbox
OPENWEATHER2_API_KEY=********************************
ONESIGNAL_APP_ID=********-****-****-****-************
ONESIGNAL_API_KEY=************************************************
ONESIGNAL_SAFARI_WEB_ID=web.onesignal.auto.********-****-****-****-************

Change DATABASE_PASSWORD according to the password you chose while creating the Postgres user.

Install Gems

Install Ruby dependencies:

gem install sassc -v '2.4.0'
gem install rmagick -v '4.1.2'
gem install nokogiri -v '1.11.0'
bundle install --without development test

Precompile assets

RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile

Setup database

RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake db:create
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake db:migrate
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake db:seed

Setup crontab

EDITOR=nano crontab -e

*/3 * * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /home/magicbox/magicbox && RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake process:run'

Run once

To verify that the whole setup works properly, you can run the app within its embedded web server :

RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec foreman start

Then connect to http://localhost:3000 to login to your Magicbox.

Default admin credentials are :

Change them ASAP when connected.

Run as a service

To run the app properly as a service you need to install the Passenger plugin for apache2.

Be sure to execute the following instructions as sudo ?

gem install passenger --no-document

passenger-install-apache2-module

And follow the wizard instructions to install Passenger.

Configure Apache virtual host

Create a new virtual host file:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/magicbox.domain.org.conf

With the following content, or alike:

  ServerName magicbox.domain.org

  <VirtualHost magicbox.domain.org:80 192.168.1.10:80>
    # Tell Apache and Passenger where your app's 'public' directory is
    DocumentRoot /home/magicbox/magicbox/public

    PassengerRuby /home/magicbox/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.7.2/wrappers/ruby

    # Relax Apache security settings
    <Directory /home/magicbox/magicbox/public>
      Allow from all
      Options -MultiViews
      # Uncomment this if you're on Apache >= 2.4:
      Require all granted
    </Directory>
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =magicbox.domain.org
    RewriteRule ^ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [END,NE,R=permanent]
  </VirtualHost>

Run with Apache

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /home/magicbox/magicbox/public

Basic configuration

With the rake db:seed command executed earlier, some presets has been populated into the database already.

Rooms

Rooms represent your growing space. You can create and manage several rooms, and for each one define a set of devices and associated scenarios to orchetrate them.

The room also host your grow subjects (e.i. plants). You can move your subjects from room to room without effort.

Devices

Device Types

Magicbox supports a known range of device types, as light, extractor, fan, sensor, etc. to help you identifying them and organizing your scenarios.

Devices of type sensor behave bifferently from other devices as they are not interactive. Currently, Magicbox only support DHT11 type of sensors (Product reference) but more will come in the future.

Devices respond to 3 basic commands:

  • Start: power up the device
  • Stop: power off the device
  • Query: get device data (for sensor devices only)

A device is attached to a room, identified with a Name in the database and by its GPIO pin number at the hardware level.

case Devices list

Watts, volts and amperes of devices can be configured in order to estimate an electical consumption of a room, by relying on enabled scenarios.

GPIO setup

The GPIO setup of devices can be a little tricky because you have to carefully track what GPIO pin of the Raspberry Pi is used and for what device.

Magicbox provides a deatiled view of your GPIO pins and attached devices at http://localhost:3000/admin/dashboard/gpio to help you fix potential issues.

case Example of GPIO mapping througt MagicBox devices

Scenarios (basic use)

Scenarios are set of conditions that trigger operations relative to devices. They are attached to one or more rooms to orchestrate and schedule what device operates and when.

Scenarios and every of their conditions are read and evaluated every 3 minutes by the rake process:run task. If a condition matched, the corresponding operation(s) will be executed.

Conditions and operations are organized by groups to give the ability to evaluate several conditions (using AND and OR logical operators) that trigger one or more operations.

Scenario
|
 -- Group 1
	|
	|-- Condition 1
	|-- Condition 2
	 -- ...
	|
	|-- Operation 1
	 -- ...
|
 -- Group 2
	|
	 - ...

Conditions can be of several types:

  • Time Range: evaluation is positive if current time is between start_time and end_time
  • Time Duration: evaluation is positive if elapsed time since last run is >= to given duration (hours + minutes)
  • Data Type: evaluation is positive if last data_type sample value match the given value with predicate (>=/<=)
  • Resource: not implmented yet
  • Device State: not implmented yet

An operation is represented by a device_type and a command (start/stop). It also supports a duration attribute in order to schedule automatically the reverse command to run after a certain amount of time (in seconds).

For example, a very simple condition could be to start the extractor between 9AM and 9PM if temperature is >= to 28°C.

scenario Example of a climat-centered scenario

Grows

A grow represents the follow-up of every steps of an indoor culture from seed/clone to harvest. It offers tools to assist, monitor, track and solve many aspect of an indoor grow.

The default grow view provides a calendar filled with events representing weeks to help you keep on schedule with the different growing phase of the plant.

When creating a new grow, all you have to do is to configure its attributes, choose a start date and define how many weeks of each phase you want to schedule:

  • Seedling
  • Vegging
  • Flowering
  • Flushing
  • Drying
  • Curing

grows List of grows

grows Grow view

Subjects

Here, a subject is a living being, generally a plant, that is part of a grow, and placed into a room.

You can move a subject from a room to another without loosing related observational data.

QR Codes

Each subject is identified by a a QR code that you can print (grouped by grow) and stick on your pots in order to keep track of your subjects alongside their lifecycle.

NB: With the iOS app coming, you can scan the subject QR code to directly post an observation on this scanned subject.

Calendar

As for individual grow, MagicBox provides a general calendar view that regroups all active grows, as well as todos, issues and observations.

grows Calendar view

Statistics

MagicBox provides a set of statistics about sensors data, system usage, OpenWeather if configured and harvest progress.

grows

  • Statistics view*

Users managment

For now users managment is very minimal with two different roles:

  • Admin: the user has full power on the system
  • User: the user has read permissiononly on non-administrative features

NB : This will be extended in the future.

Advanced configuration

Camera support

(Experimental! Do not use!)

uv4l on rpi

curl https://www.linux-projects.org/listing/uv4l_repo/lpkey.asc | sudo apt-key add -

Add : deb https://www.linux-projects.org/listing/uv4l_repo/raspbian/stretch stretch main to etc/apt/sources.list

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install uv4l uv4l-raspicam sudo apt-get install uv4l-raspicam-extras sudo apt-get install uv4l-webrtc sudo service uv4l_raspicam restart

Data Types, Resources and Categories

TBD

Alerts (and notifications)

TBD

Weather (Open Weather)

TBD

Notifications (OneSignal)

TBD

API Usage

MagicBox provides a RESTful API to interact with over HTTP. Once MagicBox is installed, the API documentation is available at http://localhost:3000/apidoc.

The API is currently under development and not ready for production yet.

TBD

iOS App

I'm also in the making of an iOS app that connects to the Magicbox API. I'm currently using it for myself, mostly for monitoring purpose and with some more work it could make a pretty nice addition to the whole system.

99 Bott… Blunts!