It really should be g/sf regardless of of the light source?
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I can agree with that 
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How many grams/sqft?
grams per watt should include hvac. I used to just exhaust, now i need hvac to run co2
So I am starting to monitor more things related to hydroponic growing lately and I have recently noticed something happening with Aroya/Meter Group and their competitor Agrowtek.
Iām late to the party but it sounds like Meter Group uses Aroya as a subsidiary to sell itās crop steering sensors and technology to the Cannabis industry. I guess they had been charging cannabis customers a monthly fee in order to use/access live data logging and recording or something? And also only selling to licensed facilities?
Iām guessing this has to do with those graphs I see people posting sometimes that track the different crop steering variables like water content, media EC, etc. Is that what theyāre charging a monthly fee for, that live graphing feature?
Now I see this other company Agrowtek has been posting about how Meter Group was trying to get them to charge the same monthly green tax to sell the same sensors but Agrowtek wants to actually do whatās right and not charge the monthly fee and instead make their own sensors separate from Meter Group?
Am I understanding this correctly?
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Thatās exactly what it is, I think I might be getting the agrowtek system since you your can just keep adding on the modules to add sensors, I think the subscription for aroya is 1$/sqft a year.
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I use agrowtek for fertigation in conjunction with growlink. Very happy. Iāve had less problems with my dosing tank than most of my friends with their inlines.
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Subscriptions for commercial software is pretty standard practice outside of the world of cannabis as well, not sure it has anything to do with a āgreen taxā. Almost every software my company uses has a subscription.
My clients will commonly use growlink, agrowtek or just Teros-12 sensors with SDI-12 data loggers. No one I work with uses Aroya, I struggle to see why you would go with the most expensive and least flexible solution out there (except perhaps for ease of use?).
I like growlink because I was able to reverse-engineer their API to access the data from the servers directly, to create some custom data websites for my clients (so we donāt have to rely on either the growlink subscription or their data services). These are the sort of charts I generate for clients on growlink:
This allows us to process the data and chart it however we want.
The Agrowtek controller have an FTP upload features with which we can achieve similar flexilibity.
For just Teros 12 + SDI-12 loggers, the solutions are often entirely custom.
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Right now I am also doing a lot of experimentations using different kinds of moisture sensors, from extremely cheap capacitive moisture sensors (The ones for Arduino you can find for 1-2 USD/sensor) to more expensive - yet still cheap - Chinese moisture content sensors (classic three prong style like the Teros 12) which also measure EC and temperature (25-50 USD/sensor). These sensors connect via RS485, so they are cheaper to interface with Arduinos compared with SDI-12 sensors.
My main issue with crop steering with moisture sensors right now is that having 1 sensor for every 500 plants is hardly representative of what really is going on in all plants. I would ideally want to have sensors in at least 5% of the plants in a room, to be able to call it āprecise irrigationā. At the very least, at least 3-4 sensors per strain, per room, would be much better.
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hi daniel about those more expensive but still cheap chinese moisture sensors how accurate are they compared to the likes of teros, acclima ect?.
I am still testing them. I am making a longer youtube video about moisture sensors so that should answer most questions when it comes out.
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thanks, ill keep an eye out for it.
Feel like sharing the growlink API hack? I would love to import data into graphana and make a really nice stats panel.
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The use of the API requires you to sniff the individual API token for each account (since they do not share these tokens anywhere). You will need to sniff the HTTP traffic between the app and their servers for every account you wish to setup. The API endpoints will also be there.
This is why so far I only do these setups for my clients.
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It seems Agrowtek is no longer going to offer Teros-12 sensors at all, since it seems Meter group has decided to not sell them sensors at all if they refuse to offer them at the same cost as Aroya. For this reason Agrowtek is just going to use their own sensor implementation from now on (probably a similar sensor to a Teros-12, like the Acclima sensors used by growlink).
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I was just on the phone with growlink and acclima. I can get the TDR for like $180 direct from acclima and apparently there is support for teros 12 on growlink now.
Also also. I Called grow link support because one of my acclima sensors died in under 24 months. I was unable to get ahold of support, didnāt leave a message was like Iāll just call back when Iām more comfortable(not on the road).
They called me back 10 min later to make sure everything was goodā¦ Pretty awesome customer service.
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was that the TDR-310W?, i paid $310 for the 5 meter version direct from acclima.
It all really seems very silly to me and a little greedy on Meter Groupās part.
These sensors arenāt really anything special or proprietary at all. I imagine Agrowtek will have their own version ready in a short time.
Iād be interested to hear an explanation from Meter Group on their reasoning behind this.
Just a guess but Iād bet thereās probably someone in the ownership structure or upper management who thinks theyāre some kind of business genius who just discovered the green tax idea.
I havenāt spoken to any of the involved parties directly, so this is probably a lot of speculation basically from some of their customers and the replies they have obtained.
I would conjecture, it might also have to do with contracts they have with Aroya, they might have a most favored nation clause or something like that, which would prevent them from selling sensors to competitors in the cannabis space at lower costs.
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