GrouuPro — the V0 greenhouse
Circa 2013–2014, GrouuPro was a built greenhouse with an automated fertigation cabinet feeding four raised beds. It collected a rich set of readings, published them to the cloud and drove its pumps and vent locally — behind a far larger master plan that was designed in full but never finished. The earliest sense → publish → visualise system in the GROUU line. Sole-authored, with build assistance from Rui Lopes.
Sense on the Yún, publish through Temboo
Arduino Uno probe boards read the sensors and handed values to an Arduino Yún over I²C; the Yún — with its Linux/network side — pushed them through Temboo, a cloud middleware, into a Google Spreadsheet that logged and charted the data. (The final fullprobe_TEMBOO sketch read every sensor on the Yún itself.) Temboo → Sheets was the working stand-in while the full server was still being built.
GrouuPro data path (as it actually ran)
PROBE Arduino Uno — DHT22 · LDR · soil moisture · leaf wetness · DS18B20 · pH │ I²C (I2C_Anything, central @ addr 42) GATEWAY Arduino Yún (Bridge + Temboo) │ Temboo "AppendRow" Choreo Google Spreadsheet "GROUU_EXP" — timestamped rows; its charts were the dashboard
A greenhouse and a fertigation cabinet
Engineered and built as a product — a glazed structure plus a four-level ferti-rega cabinet — with the design work in SolidWorks, Rhino, SketchUp and AutoCAD. It sensed a lot and actuated locally; there was no custom PCB — pumps and motors ran on perfboard MOSFETs.
| Part | Role |
|---|---|
| DHT22 · LDR · soil moisture · leaf wetness · DS18B20 · pH | The sensor "probe" — air, light, soil & leaf |
| Tank level sensors + flow sensor | Water & ferti-rega tanks; irrigation flow |
| LEXAN 8 mm polycarbonate + BWF aluminium | Greenhouse glazing & structural frame |
| 6× peristaltic pumps (BPER_1–6) | Dose concentrated nutrient solutions |
| Main irrigation pump + electrovalves | Distribute fertigated water to 4 raised beds |
| Top-hatch servo | Ventilation (local actuation) |
| MOSFETs on perfboard | Drive the DC pumps / motors — no custom PCB |
The master plan
GrouuPro was designed as a full product, laid out module by module in the GROUU OUTLINE. Only the sensing + Temboo-logging half was reached — but the intended stack is almost exactly what GROUU became years later.
Envisioned architecture (GROUU OUTLINE, p.10)
PROBE 1..4 ──► Arduino Yún (Arduino + Node client)
│
Raspberry Pi + Node server
│
Web server — front end ──► other units register · other users
| Layer | Hardware / software | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Probes | 4× Arduino Uno + sensors | Read air / soil / light / leaf per raised bed; hand values up over I²C |
| Gateway | Arduino Yún (Arduino + Node client) | Aggregate the probes, run the local Node client, reach the network |
| Server | Raspberry Pi + Node server | Store readings, run the app logic, serve the front end |
| Front end | Web server | The browser app — dashboards, tests, controls; multi-unit, multi-user |
Only the sensing layer shipped: the Yún published to Temboo → Google Sheets as a stand-in while the Node server and web app were still being built. The lineage to today is direct:
| Layer | GrouuPro master plan (2013) | GROUU · now (V2 / V3) |
|---|---|---|
| Node | Yún + 4 probes (Node client) | ESP32 / XIAO → WiFi & LoRaWAN → MQTT |
| Server | Raspberry Pi + Node server | Mosquitto + Node-RED + InfluxDB |
| Dashboard | Web front end + anomaly alerts | Grafana + web dashboard + alerts |
| Scale | Many units register, many users | Many nodes, one shared stack |
The app map
The web app was specced in full — seven modules — but never built beyond the data logging. Straight from the outline:
| Module | What it does |
|---|---|
| Login | User + password entry. |
| Profile | Name, email, password; Admin / User roles — admin edits, user consults. |
| Environmental definitions | Global set-points & limits: temperature, humidity, photoperiod (start / end), light (µEinsteins). |
| Tests | Per-raised-bed experiments — plant, goal (crop / blooming / rooting / fruit-set), data-collection interval, moisture; plus moisture-stress overrides and fertirrigation scheduling. |
| Watering solutions | Named nutrient recipes — up to six products with concentrations; insert → mix → save → available to fertirrigation. |
| Log & annotation | Per-test autolog (timestamped probe + greenhouse data), qualitative / quantitative notes and photos; archive a finished test to PDF. |
| Dashboard | Real-time charts with anomaly alerts — global (temperature, humidity, photoperiod, luminance) and per-test (+ soil temp, moisture, leaf wetness & hours). |
What shipped: data collection ✅ · Temboo → Sheets publication ✅ · local actuation ✅. Remote control ❌ · automation ❌ · the full server & app ❌ — the project ended before them.
Photos
Explore it in the browser
More recent GROUU designs are modelled in Autodesk Fusion, which embeds an interactive web viewer. The greenhouse is being rebuilt in Fusion — its model will drop in right here.
What's kept, and where
The firmware, the master-plan outline and key drawings are committed; the 1.5 GB of CAD, renders and raw photos are catalogued in the manifest and referenced on backup. (Temboo/Google credentials in the sketches are redacted.)