An addition I 'd like to see for the Growduino project is to add an email feature that would ema...

[G+_Steve Lovejoy]

An addition I'd like to see for the Growduino project is to add an email feature that would email when the valve opened and again when the valve closed. This way I'd know if the valve did not close and I should find someone to turn off the water.

 

If there are other email using arduino projects that I can reference to learn how to do this and determine the hardware needed, that would help too.

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

When wanting to add things like email, that type of thing is better done with a Raspberri Pi.

 

If your only doing a small grow pod, then just a Raspberri Pi.

 

If a medium to large setup, I'd use multiple ESP8266 boards as they're arduino compatible and include wifi for network coms. Arduinos and even the ESP8266 boards just don't have enough storage to do things like email protocols. The ESP8266 boards can do very, very basic web pages, as all a web page is, is a specifically formatted text file. So, a Respberri Pi for the human interface portion (email, web server to change settings, etc), and an Arduino to actually control everything.

[G+_Steve Lovejoy]

Processing web pages was more than I was thinking of.  I was thinking of small stuff (even sending email that ends up being text message (send to @vtext.com for verizon). Maybe also processing an email (just the subject line) to get the arduino to send back the status of sensors, last time the valve was opened, etc.

 

The ESP8266 looks interesting. I had seen wifi shields and this looks like a good idea too. I'll look at this some more. (Just need Padre to add this to Growduino to use as a teaching tool for me - haha)

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

Adafruit.com has instructions on how to use Arduino code on their ESP8266 boards, so you can actually use the code they've done for grow how with them.

 

You could probably send a text with some sort of comm board, the different carriers normally have a web portal you can send a text string to and get a text message sent that way. That would work with an ESP8266, but enough of an SNMP stack to send email I kinda doubt.

[G+_Chris Druif (Automated]

Technical aspects aside; I wouldn't send "logs" to yourself, only "error" messages. It should be simple enough to make it check itself if the valve it opened closed again within the designated time. It could only then send a message to actually let you know that something isn't going well.

 

The problem with your own suggestion is that you get used to messages being sent to you about your Growhow. By the time something is up you'll won't respond adequately.

 

So don't send logs to yourself, only errors ?