This system is designed to enable the study of mass/weight change over time for a set or sets of plants. Additionally, the automatic watering and drought of plants are handled by this system.
By recording changes in weight at a minute-minute scale, plant behaviours can be accurately described, allowing for sophisticated and informative research to be undertaken.
Here, a full blueprint and implementation compendium for a plant phenotyping system is provided.
While there exists commercial solutions to gravimetric plant phenotyping, none are provided as open-source solutions.
This project was designed and implemented at the National Plant Phenomics Centre in Aberystwyth, Wales, UK. Built from the ground up using widely available parts, allowing for adaption and scaling.
Designs for physical hardware components used, software for hardware interaction, databases and web interfaces are all provided.
The basic day-to-day flow is as such:
Additional interactions, such as updating weights or changing watering times/frequency is performed manually through the web interface.
Key components provided are:
To provide a clean and simple interface between hardware and software, a central python script is used to fetch information from the database and pass it to the low-level hardware interactions, it also interprets output and updates the database accordingly.
A low-level unix C library named "GraviUtils" is used to interact with load-cells (balances) over a serial connection to a Raspberry Pi controller.
In addition to reading balance information for a series of load-cells, the utilities library controls and manages the watering of plants.
A Flask based web server allows for simple uploading of new plants and experiments onto the system - this is designed for non-technical users to interact with.
Relying heavily on interpreting CSV files and converting them to database queries, the interaction is straight forward.
Everything from electrical wiring diagrams, Raspberry Pi GPIO connections to prototype designs are available in various files.
A MySQL database has been used for this project, setup scripts and database schemas are provided that quickly construct and setup all tables and requirements.