More Power To Your Greenhouse

Wisse Hettinga | May 24, 2017 | Hardware | No Comments

According to the experts, there is no greater joy than using your own home-grown vegetables and herbs in your cooking. A small pot of herbs in the window frame is capable of changing a dull plate of food into nice cuisine. If you have a garden or a balcony big enough for a small greenhouse you can even think of growing your own vegetables.

To ensure a continuous supply of greens and herbs you will need to make sure the greenhouse is smart enough to ‘create’ the right conditions for the vegetables and herbs to grow: temperature, humidity, light, water and ventilation are the most important elements to make the miracle happen. Some people are happy enough to take care of creating these conditions themselves by giving the plants a lot of love, care and attention. If you don’t have time for that, this might be the opportunity to call in the help of a MIAC industrial controller.

The MIAC is designed to measure and control all sorts of equipment that can help you making a smart greenhouse. For the temperature and humidity you can buy a single sensor to give you the output voltage for the MIAC to switch on a light or heating element if the greenhouse is too cold – or alternatively, open the ventilation if the temperature is too high.

The MIAC will be able to control the supply of water during the height of summer, or switch on the lights on dark and gloomy days.

The diagram below gives you an idea of the setup.

You can make this project a reality with all sorts of developments boards, but the advantage of using a MIAC controller is in the fact that all the necessary relays and drivers are integrated to the unit – out of the box – ready to use!

In addition to that, the MIAC comes with a backlit LCD display, enabling you to check the parameters (temperature and humidity for example) and using the function keys you can make adjustments or switch on the water supply manually. With the optional Wi-Fi or Bluetooth MIAC options, you can even think of controlling your greenhouse remotely from a website or by using your mobile phone.

What’s more, due to the industrial grade housing and the 35mm ‘top hat’ DIN rail connection, the MIAC can be placed in any convenient place.

To program the MIAC you can choose from a variety of programming languages due to the options of 8-bit PIC, 16-bit dsPIC, Arduino or Raspberry-Pi versions of the controller.