The box would include LED lightning and ventilation.
It would regulate the temperature, humidity and it may filter out any smells.
The aim is to make it as autonomous as it can get!
The main controller would be an ESP8266 in the form of the nodeMCU platform.
Yup, that's definitely the case, for many plants the wind causes the stems to strengthen.
For your algae problem, it's absolutely vital that no light gets into your nutrient solution / rockwool. In natural soil this doesn't occur, since of course soil is black. But with light + nutrients, you're gonna get a lot of algae, think of a stagnant pond.
You might be able to recover just by blocking light from your existing equipment, the existing algae might die off with no further light.