At Home Hydroponics: The Motivation Behind

A first approach.

Everything started with a love for strawberries.

The idea was (and still is) to build a system that could grow strawberries through the most practical and efficient method at home. This single idea sparked so many more and involved me in an endless path to look for the best method to grow fruits and vegetables at home, with a low level of complexity so that almost any tinkerer could join the fun, and for a relatively low cost.

As a mechanical engineer, the 3D printing and building was a joy to start with, but the electronics and PCB design was a challenge. It was my first approach at something like it. But luckily there are a ton of solutions for almost any skill level, although, there are always trade-offs.

Throughout the posts you will see how the system kept improving, and how it will continue to as I find new methods and re-design several components.

The objective behind all of Lesman Innovation's projects is to prototype fast, find what doesn't work and re-iterate. And oh boy did I find mistakes!

Below you can see the first approach I took to trying to maintain some strawberries I bought from Home Depot.

And then this is the latest development.

After starting with strawberries and understanding the complexity of not just the electronics, but of the plants, soil, light requirements, and nutrients, I decided to step down the complexity and try lettuce first, which did help on improving the system and not having to play with so many variables at the same time.

Throughout this journey I will continue to share the different arrangements and choices I have made for the hydroponic system, along with little nuggets of information I have found along the way.

Stay tuned for more.