Short answers to common questions, each with a link to more detail.
Crop Steering is free, open-source software that waters each zone of a grow room from what its moisture probes read, inside Home Assistant. It decides when and how much to water each zone across four daily phases, runs safety checks before each shot, and records every shot.
How it worksCrop steering is watering container plants in small shots timed by how far the substrate has dried back, so you can lean the plants toward vegetative or generative growth. It describes an intended direction, not a guaranteed plant response.
The glossaryYes. It is MIT-licensed, with no subscription and no licence key. The optional AI assistant uses your own AI provider API key, and you set a daily spending budget for it.
About the projectIt is an independent open-source project maintained on GitHub, and it is not an official Home Assistant project.
About the projectYes, if Home Assistant shows them as the right kind of entity with a supported unit: a switch or valve for each zone valve and pump, and a sensor in % or m³/m³ for moisture. Crop Steering does not pair devices; Home Assistant does.
The hardware guideA Home Assistant host, one switch or valve per zone and one moisture probe per zone. EC probes, feed probes, tank level and flow meters are optional but recommended.
Minimum setup for one zoneNot as an input: EC must be in mS/cm, dS/m or µS/cm, because ppm depends on the meter's conversion scale. You can choose ppm as a display unit.
Accepted unitsUp to 24 zones per room, and you can set up several rooms, each with its own kill switch. The controller opens one zone at a time.
Room size and plumbingIt is built for container growing, and setup offers generic, stone wool and coco. Other substrates run as generic, with targets you set and check yourself.
Room size, substrates and plumbingYes, for a batch tank with up to 8 dosing pumps per room whose own firmware times each dose; pH correction is opt-in. Dosing has been tested against a scripted pump, not yet on real plumbing.
Batch-tank dosingNo. It reads climate sensors for its records, and it can dim lights when the substrate is dry if you opt in, never below 30 % and never off.
What Crop Steering does and does not doYou need Home Assistant 2024.10 or newer. If you have never set it up, the grow-controller tutorial starts from an empty small computer.
Build a grow controller (new to Home Assistant)No, not to water: the controller talks to Home Assistant on your own network. Only the optional AI assistant calls an outside AI service, with your key.
Security and privacyIt skips a shot when a reading is missing or out of range, and stops watering when a switch does not report its new state. It is not an emergency stop. Earlier releases have closed live shots, restarted and switched a room off on a real installation (switch and controller behaviour; measured water delivery is still to be commissioned); release 3.18 has not yet been run on real plumbing, so start on one zone with a catch test.
Safety featuresThe controller closes the shot in progress when it stops, and resumes its accepted setup after a restart. An unreadable kill switch counts as off.
What happens after a crash or restartNo. Without it the controller runs on its rules. With it, code checks every AI answer against hard limits, and the AI can never run a pump or valve.
How the AI is usedYes. The live demo is the real dashboard on synthetic data. At home you can map a virtual switch as a test valve.
The live demoOpen a GitHub issue with the alert code, both version numbers and the controller log.
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