Albert's Greenhouse

You may have noticed that most of the posts on this blog are about the plants I grow, or see, or whatever. Operative word being that the posts are on the plants. This post, along with a few I'm contemplating, is different. It's about some greenhouse hardware.

I've wanted to be able to post realtime temperature data ( and more... ) on my alsgh.com website for a while now. I mostly just want to be able to keep track of things when I'm away from home, but I think that the temperature trends in my greenhouse might be interesting to others who are trying to grow the plants that I grow.

Meanwhile, I've been working on a 2nd, very small, highland tropical greenhouse, for those plants that are from cooler, higher altitude regions of the tropics and therefore requiring of cooler days and nights. My intent is to provide a maximum daytime temperature of around 75F and a minimum nighttime temperature of 45F or so. As part of this project, I looked into new ways to monitor the greenhouse temperature.

In my hot house, I have a remote thermometer/hygrometer from Oregon Scientific which transmits to a receiver in my bedroom. That way I can see the temperature every day and make sure things haven't gotten out of hand. The thermometer sensor is at the very edge of its radio range here, however, and it sometimes fails to give a reading. The new cool house is located somewhat further away, so I figured that a similar setup would not work.

I started to look into the possibility of putting a small computer in the new greenhouse and using that to monitor the temperature and more. I found the FitPC Slim, which is a very tiny computer that runs Windows XP, has 3 USB ports, a VGA port, an Ethernet port and WiFi. It's made by an Israeli company that normally does embedded computers. It goes for about $350 on amazon.com. I also found the TEMPerHum USB stick that's made by a Chinese company called Shenzen RDing Tech. It's not officially imported into the USA by anyone, but you can get it online shipped from Hong Kong for about $25.

It took me a while to get some working software for the stick, but in the end, everything worked out pretty well, and I now have almost realtime temperature monitoring online. You can read more about the setup on my greenhouse pages.