I have been thinking about scaling it up. A couple of months ago when I started thinking about this project I also started an experiment with other (non automated) ways of keeping the basil alive.

I have some dirt based solutions. Which are nice and traditional but have some drawbacks: it is messy and you need to constant water it. But I am already solving this part.

The one I want to scale up is my deep water hydroponics setup (on the right side of the picture above). At the moment I have 4 pots filled with hydro clay pebbles in a small ikea tank with an air pump powered aquarium airstone.

As seen in the picture above I have some intruders (non basil) in my setup which seem to grow well.

My plans are to increase the number of hydroponics pots. I have setup the hydroponics next to the refrigerator and this seems to be a good place. I would like to expand vertical. Build a second setup above the current one.

I can use the water from the hydroponics to water the dirt based plants, using the electronics I am developing now.

Challenges:

• Noise: the bubbles from the airstone are noisy. So some sound proofing has to happen because it is in my living room.
• Space: There is not a lot of space so a nice efficient structure has to be made.
• Monitoring: I need to get some sort of notification if I need to do something (add/change water or nutrients). Failure notifications, temperature, light conditions, pH and nutrient level. And report this all to some web based service.
• Light: It get dark here in the winter. If I want to keep the basil alive in the winter I need to add light.