NachtRave's Hydruino, Helioduino Arduino Libraries Aim to Get You Started with Hydroponics, Solar
"Doing little hydroponics setups or solar tracking setups are absolutely beautiful starter projects," NachtRave says.
Pseudonymous programmer and self-described "tinkerer" NachtRave has released a pair of Arduino libraries that aim to simplify the creation of hydroponics and solar power projects: Hydruino and Helioduino.
"About ~8 months ago, as I've been between jobs, I embarked on a quest, at my own peril, to build a freely available hydroponics controller, which eventually branched out into making both a professional grade hydroponics controller and solar tracker," NachtRave explains. "I have seen how popular these kinds of Arduino projects have become, especially with those learning about such, and was rather disappointed that there wasn't a freely-available, modern, well-written, and well-maintained Arduino library out there."
The problem, in NachtRave's eyes: many developers of such projects appeared to have moved away from the Arduino platform to the Raspberry Pi and other more powerful single-board computers. Considering such devices overkill — not to mention currently hard to find in stock — the tinkerer decided to do something about it and "give something back to the world" in the form of two Arduino libraries, fully compatible with classic AVR microcontrollers.
"Doing little hydroponics setups or solar tracking setups are absolutely beautiful starter projects for anyone interested in learning a bit of DIY electronics and how to reduce their carbon footprint," NachtRave opines. "I've painstakingly designed these controller libraries to make it easy for newcomers to build a DIY system, with ever expanding documentation and features that I feel is really going to take off eventually."
Hydruino and Helioduino are available on their respective GitHub repositories now, under the permissive MIT license — "100 percent free, 100 percent open source, 100 percent ours," NachtRave says.