The seedlings that look so promising have unfortunately died.

I suspect the cause of their demise was changing the relative humidity of their container by placing a clear plastic cover over the planter. I noticed it was getting quite sunny so I put the cover on hoping it would help retain some moisture.

Alas, the lettuce died. For reference, the lettuce I am attempting to grow is black seeded simpson.

We will see what happens with the next set. In addition, I've sown the seeds for the spinach, which is Emilia F1.

In other good news, I've organized the licensing related stuff and added an Apache 2.0 license header to the source code. This should fulfill the requirements for the Hackaday 2017 Internet of Useful Things contest.

I have also gotten the agi-esp8266 microcontroller setup again and uploaded a new photo of the prototype unit. Down the road I will be designing a PCB to include everything needed and having additional prototypes printed for deployment to some of my family up north in the community of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. The reason I chose to use 1x4 for the shelves primarily relates to making the brains of the setup easy to ship. I'm going to revise the construction/erection setup as I go because I'd prefer if the entire configuration required the least amount of tools possible. To that end, I picked up a 3D printer so I can print brackets to replace the Tee Nut and eye bolts. The reason for this is that constructing the shelves then requires a drill. Ideally, I'd like the end user setting such a unit up to only require a hand saw or skillsaw to adjust the shelf to match the width of their window then using a commonly available screwdriver to attach the brackets to an level adjuster connected to the aircraft cable.

Amongst the environmental considerations involved with growing on a window sill are including enough insulation and artificial LED light to augment natural daylight. It will likely be a bit of work to get that figured out.

Essentially, the problem with growing plants so near a window in the arctic relate to how cold it is in the winter months. I am anticipating needing multiple layers of clear plastic vapour barrier to be added to a window to retain as much heat as possible. The only way to know what this will look like is getting a unit setup on a window in the north, once at that point additional in situ data would be needed.

Another idea that I had for retaining both heat and humidity involved using LED lights to raise the temperature of the plants by a few degrees and to maintain humidity, I was also thinking of having on the other side of the window (the interior) a lightweight frame with clear plastic vapour barrier to act as a moisture and heat retaining insert. This would obviously need to be removable so that the end user could service and water their plants. However, how such a setup would work is vague at the moment. I will clearly need to be exploring options for that.

Most homes in the Canadian north used forced air heating, which tends to rapidly decrease relative humidity.