Growmanager: A Garden-Variety Open Source Project
by Lisa Hoover - May. 05, 2009Comments (1)Forget AeroGardens and blogging plants, if you've got a green thumb then check out Growmanager, an open source greenhouse control system created for home and professional growers. Licensed under the GNU GPL, this clever software turns greenhouse lights on and off, monitors soil moisture and environmental temperature, and even lets you watch your plants grow via Web cam.
The system is designed to allow users to pick and choose only the modules they need based on what's being grown and in what environment, so large-scale growers can manage elaborate heating and cooling systems while smaller growers can simply use it to water soil or feed plants.
According to the project's Web site, "Growmanager provides an easy to use grapical user interface which can be controlled intuitively. The goal is to provide a modularised framework where every user can pick and install the modules he needs (or reinstall and upgrade later when needed). With a fully documented library of developer resources, Growmanager allows the customisation of every aspect of the framework."
Though Growmanager is still a fairly new project -- it relaunched in April, 2007 -- the developer's future plans show a lot of promise for turning it into a powerful tool to help growers manage large greenhouses. Planned features include touchscreen and PDA support, grow calculators to estimate costs of water, energy and nutrients, and grow profiles for different stages and species of plants.
For now, Growmanager runs only on Windows 2000 / XP and is written in Microsoft Visual Basic 6. However, the developer will be recoding the entire project into .Net or Java and is preparing to park the project on SourceForge so people can volunteer to help.
