Hello!!!! Its been a very long time since I last updated the project page or posted a log. First and foremost I would like to thank the community for its tremendous support of the project and all your kind words, the positive encouragement of this community helped give me the drive to take this project as far as I did, so thank you!!!!

So without further do some updates. By the end of the Hackaday prize HydroPWNics only achieved partial completion and partial functionality. The main complete components were the NFT grow system built from PVC pipe and fence post and the LED grow light. The rest of everything was only partially completed. For the most part enough got completed to deploy the garden/grow system in "manual mode" in other words I took care of it and maintained it by hand like my other gardens/plants. I tried to run it this way for about two months before I decided that my lighting was inadequete and that the whole system could use an overhaul, the plants did stay alive for that time but they didn't grow much, but that's ok no one is an expert their first time around!!! The remainder of this winter and the coming spring will be deicated to overhauling HydroPWNics and bringing it to complete functionality.

The new direction of the project is to turn focus to hardware and software. Currently the hardware is being redesigned to correct design errors found with the original boards. First the plan was to just revise the analog/digital modules and the module hub but after doing the analog module and starting the digital module I decided that this might not be the best way to do things. So since last weekend I have been working to roll the digital and analog modules along with the module hub into a single standalone board. The idea is that there will be many of these boards in one system all doing different things. This new module is called the AD Module AD being short for Analog/Digital. Additionally I am also designing a smaller version of this module with onboard sensors, this module will be very similar but will be focused on monitoring the climate of a garden, light, temp, and humidity plus some addon ports. There will be a dedicated post discussing the specific of the new hardware down the road, everything is still subject to change.

As far as software goes, so little got done during the HydroPWNics project that its all subject to change. Originally HydroPWNics was going to have a completely custom software system with a dedicated website and cloud database, it changed slightly when I chose to use and work with Vivaplanet.io but still it was mostly a custom system. The new direction for the software is focus on tight integration with Vivaplanet.io, in short I'm not attached to my original proposal so anything is possible now!

While HydroPWNics hasn't been updated at all since the end of the hackaday prize ended, there still has been quite a bit of effort towards other projects that are either related or an essential component to the system. While I was taking a break to meditate on the new hardware direction (see above) my collaboration Shane Kirkbride and his Vivaplanet.io colleague have been working on the following projects:
https://hackaday.io/project/8657-open-source-hardware-plant-health-monitor
https://hackaday.io/project/9694-ras-pherry-wireless-ph-sensor
https://hackaday.io/project/6032-hummingbird

This is just a short update to give people the jist of what is going on, thank you again for the amazing support of the project and stay tuned for more updates!!!!