The Plantronics project aims to provide flexible, customizable vivarium controlling software to the Raspberry Pi. The software is developed in two parts and is meant to run on Raspberry Pi with JavaFx with an Arduino module for sensor readings.
The Raspberry Pi portion of the project can be run without input sensors for simplicity and can control seasonal daylight changes, misting and fogging schedules, ventilation and circulation schedules, and heating and cooling schedules. The outputs for controlling lighting can support 4 channels- White, Red, Green, and Blue. The added Arduino portion of the project can provide input for temperature and humidity sensors with USB serial comminication between the Raspberry Pi and Arduino. This allows the user to set minimum and maximum ranges of humidity or temperature. The user can also create daily scheduled tasks of all hardware outputs (misting, fogging, circulating, ventilating, heating, and cooling) and set specific lengths of each scheduled task. A user can set up custom seasons throughout the calendar year with temperature ranges, hanumity ranges, sunrise and sunset times for each season. The system will generate gradual changes between all of these settings each day mimicing the gradual changes of seasons in nature.
Aside from changing the sunrise and sunset times, the RGB color outputs will gradually change to simulate the Kelvin color temperature changes that happen with natural daylight and sunrises/sunsets. Midday color temperatures will give a strong white light, that slowly warms in temperature through the afternoon, finally ending with an orange and red hued sunset. This feature can be used by itself as a simple DIY Raspberry Pi light controller if no other features of the application are needed.