What is GrowSmart?

This is GrowSmart:

GrowSmart is a system that allows you to monitor and control the environment in your grow box/tent/room, to ensure the health of your plants and maximize their yield.

The general parameters for healthy and productive plants are well known, and there are already similar open-source projects and commercial solutions, but those are either just an "good enough" rough implementation, or require custom hardware, or have a limited feature set - or are very expensive and don't allow much customization.

The idea behind GrowSmart is having a system that uses only off-the-shelf components, allows full customization, can be expanded with new features, uses a unified framework for both the software and hardware components, and is still affordable, if not even cheap.

Concept

The central component of GrowSmart is the GrowSmart Core, which is an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with a 5V PSU and a LTC4311 I2C Extender, running the ESPHome home automation framework.

The great thing about ESPHome is the support for a multitude of sensors and controllers, typically used for home automation, which removes the need for any low-level coding to integrate any components, as everything is just configured via YAML files.

The ESP32-S3 in the GrowSmart Core communicates with all other components of GrowSmart via an I2C bus, and thanks to the LTC4311 I2C extender these components can be located multiple meters away, instead of (ideally) just a couple of centimeters, or a maximum of 1 meter.

To connect the components to the GrowSmart core, simple Cat6 Ethernet cables with RJ45 connectors are used. This allows for easy and tool-less installation and swapping of components, and makes cable routing a breeze as nothing is hard-wired.