The Greenhouse
Verdify runs in a real greenhouse in Longmont, Colorado. The building is compact, but the operating problem spans structure, climate, water, crops, sensors, and equipment in one room.
The useful fact is that the room is not uniform. South runs hotter and drier. East is cooler and more humid. West is flexible but gets late-day sun. The controller and planner use those differences instead of pretending the greenhouse has one climate.
This page is the human-scale tour. For the plain-language control summary, start with Operations. The full measurement model, dimensions, glazing, airflow, solar geometry, and thermal envelope live on Physical Structure. The planner can only act through bounded parameters listed in AI Tunables Traceability.
Physical Snapshot
Interior growing and equipment space documented in Physical Structure.
Peaked-roof geometry makes air mixing different from a flat grow room.
Longmont dry air makes temperature and VPD management inseparable.
Geometry concentrates solar load, exhaust, misting, and heat-loving crops.
Verdify is best understood as a narrow production room wrapped around a service wall. The north wall connects to the house and carries heat, water, intake air, the utility sink, the irrigation manifold, and the ESP32 control hardware. The east wall holds the patio-door intake path and NFT hydroponics. The west wall is the long shelf and grow-light wall. The faceted south end is the hot, bright exhaust end with fans, wall misters, floor pots, and the strongest solar stress.
The structure page has the exact wall lengths and thermal math; this page explains why those facts matter operationally.
The six-wall shape creates different solar angles through the day. The south faces take the peak heat load. The east wall gets tree shade and supports the hydroponic system. The west wall has the longest shelf run and the strongest artificial light coverage.
Inside are hydroponic NFT channels, shelf bays, floor pots, overhead misters, circulation fans, exhaust fans, heaters, fog, grow lights, and a dense sensor/control network.
How The Room Is Organized
The greenhouse has five practical areas, not one generic “inside”:
- North service core: heat, water, intake vent, irrigation manifold, utility sink, ESP32 controller, and relay hardware.
- East growing wall: patio-door intake path, workbench, hydroponic NFT channels, reservoir, seedlings, greens, and strawberries.
- West shelf wall: long production run with shelf starts, herbs, cucumbers, flexible crop space, and dense grow-light coverage.
- South exhaust end: highest solar load, two angled exhaust fans, wall misters, hotter crops, and the fastest thermal swings.
- Center aisle/reference zone: circulation path, fog influence, camera-visible crop checks, and average-reference sensing.
The two public camera snapshots now live on the homepage so the first public entry point shows the room behind the telemetry. They are evidence context, not a control input; the ESP32 still owns relay decisions locally.
Microclimates
| Microclimate | Zones | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Hot and dry | South | Peak solar load, exhaust path, heat-loving crops. |
| Cool and humid | East | Tree shade, hydroponic evaporation, leafy greens and strawberries. |
| Flexible | West | Long shelf wall, strong grow-light coverage, starts and mixed crops. |
| Utility/reference | North, Center | Equipment wall and center reference zone. |
Detailed generated zone profiles remain available for the full sensor, equipment, water, and planting inventory: all zones.
What Makes It Hard
The overview version is simple: the same room is trying to grow plants, shed heat, hold humidity, move air, protect equipment, and keep water where it belongs. Every correction has side effects.
The detailed physics live elsewhere. Climate Control explains temperature, VPD, solar pressure, fog, and ventilation. Physical Structure owns geometry and thermal envelope. Safety Architecture owns the control boundary and firmware-risk story.
The south wall photo is the concrete example. Exhaust, misting, sensors, hot crops, and solar exposure occupy the same physical end of the greenhouse, so the controller has to manage tradeoffs in place rather than in a clean simulation.
For operating evidence, Operations shows runtime, relay burden, device state, and what the system is trying to do during normal lighting, wetting, irrigation, and night periods.
Growing System
The current growing system mixes hydroponics and soil:
- East: recirculating NFT hydroponics for leafy greens and strawberries.
- South: floor pots and hotter crops.
- West: shelf starts, herbs, cucumbers, and flexible production.
- North: equipment, manifolds, and utility hardware.
The crop profiles and zone records are generated references. They should support the main story, not dominate it.
Reference Pages
- Physical structure: dimensions, glazing, thermal envelope, and light transmission.
- Operations policy: TLDR for lighting, climate, misters, irrigation, fertilization, and night behavior.
- Equipment inventory: relays, sensors, pumps, valves, heaters, fans, lights, and misters.
- Crops and growing: crop placement, hydroponics, and plant stress context.
- Soil sensors: root-zone moisture, temperature, EC, and the irrigation story beneath the climate loop.
- Generated lessons: validated operational lessons from planning cycles.