Awesome. May have to experiment with some jalapeños 
Updates for today:
I have all the data for the old allgrowers forum. The server is full because the backup is running to itself. Is there interest in making that available again?
I have a path forward for exposing the sensor data that has been requested.
But before I start adding a bunch of new stuff, I need to get the system a bit more reliable so I don’t break anything that is currently working.
For example: In software development, the correct practice is to write “Tests” that ensure your code is working as you expect it to. Then, when you need to figure out why something isn’t working, you can look at the test, compare that to real world behavior, and add new tests to cover things you didn’t expect when you were writing the code.
Ideally, every line of code written has a test that validates it. In reality, it’s considered very good if a company has 80% test coverage or better.
On average… test coverage is between 5-10%.
The grobo systems need a lot more tests. I’ve already accidentally broken things here and there because a change I made to fix one thing broke something else. Fortunately I have enough monitoring in place to catch this now. I should know if there’s a problem before you do. And I’ve proactively emailed some people when I see that the system had an error doing something for their grobo.
Another issue that I’m running into is that multiple branches of the same codebase are used for different parts of the system. I think I have most of this teased out. But the problem is that it is very difficult to comprehend which version of the application has the code needed to run on which server, and any documentation on this has not survived.
Much of the system ops are from ~2016 or so. It’s not unusual for companies to put off modernizing their systems in favor of pushing harder on product features. But this is creating some practical problems for me where some of the dependencies have been obsolete for 4+ years. Nice helpers that we’ve come to expect in modern software development don’t exist until I upgrade them. Additionally, some of the stuff won’t run on my M1 mac, because it didn’t exist when this stuff was released, so I have to emulate a lot of the server side development workflow. Besides being another hurdle, it’s significantly slower.
So even if we did have 100% test coverage, it would take hours for me to verify changes instead of minutes.
I believe I’ve gotten back to everyone who has written. There’s no support system in place yet, and with email, discord, here, and reddit, there’s a lot to keep track of.
So if you don’t see some of the features you’d like show up in the next day or two, know that I’m working on it, safely.
I can see more than 100 grobos presently online. More than one year later, I think that’s incredible! I hope we can get more people growing.
Let let me know if you need anything!
Also, a preview:
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Thanks for all your efforts on this!! I am one of the one thats still been online and growing with great success until recently, couldn’t work out why my last grow wasn’t successful. I know realise it was pulling the schedule! Just about to transfer a grow from the grobo start this week so we will see how this one goes now with everything back online. I still have enough bottles for another 2 grows (i bought in bulk just before bankruptcy) cant wait to finally see ph and ec!! Cannot understand why this was never made available from the start. Looking forward to seeing where you can take this. Thanks again your effort is really appreciated!! 
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I’ve spent the last ~2 days getting the application software dependencies up to date and fixing broken unit tests. Lots of them needed network access to work, which is a big no-no, so I fixed those and built some stubs. I’m going to slowly be getting the test coverage up as I continue to discover things are broken after I push new code to production.
I can now get the application running in my native M1 / arm64 environment, which means development will be much faster.
Additionally, I’ve been through the factory setup process and it works very well. If you’re having serious trouble with your Grobo, hold the button down for 10 seconds until the light turns green and go back through setup.
This works on the website perfectly fine. The mobile apps are not needed. The way it does this is pretty cool. The grobo has a tiny webserver, and the app running in browser knows how to connect to it when you change your wifi network.
It only works from a computer if you have a second internet connection. It should work with only one connection so I need to see what’s going on there. It should work from phones very well.
While I’ve got the dependencies upgraded significantly, there is still a long ways to go. Some of this necessitates moving to new servers. I can share more once some of this upgrading is complete.
I’m also flying to the dispensary where a lot of the old Grobo assets are stored later this week. I’m hopeful there are spare parts and such there. I only have the one grobo I bought as a customer a couple of years ago to test with and it makes doing things like firmware updates pretty sketch.
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We managed to grab a backup at some point however have not yet migrated it here. The old forum has LOADS of info that I’m sure all our veteran growers would like to visit and pull from again. We started this one when Grobo shut theirs down.
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Going through the wifi-setup process on the website does not work.
The reason is because modern browsers prevent websites from talking to devices on your local network, rightly so. This prevents people from getting you to click on something that might, for example, reconfigure your wifi so they can get in.
There are various ways around this and none of them too clean. For now, use the android or ios app if you need to get back into your wifi. I don’t have the app back the the apple store yet, still working on that.
If you don’t have access to any of the apps and you need to reset your wifi, send me an email and we’ll figure something out.
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I’m updating some of the grobo.ca DNS records to consolidate things and stop pointing to shopify “site down” pages.
Sometimes this results in availability blips. If you see a “grobo offline” message, please give it a few minutes and try again.
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I went to Portland yesterday and went through what’s left of Grobo inventory after auction.
There are tons of nutrients, coco pods, a few Grobo Starts, lots of starter packs for that, PH and EC calibration solutions, carbon filters, etc.
I don’t know if the consumables (nutes, pods) are safe to use after sitting for a year. Some of the bulk wrapped pods have condensation inside the bag which spells fungus to me. The individually wrapped coco pods seem fine. All this to say, it’s going to take some time (and maybe some volunteers, some of you with 2-3 grobos) to see if the responsible thing to do here is sadly dispose of a lot of this stuff.
I am working on how to do fulfillment. I can’t bring all that stuff back with me to San Francisco, nor do I have room for it.
I was able to salvage some spare parts from 8 or so beat up grobos that I guess they had in the office for warranty/refurbishment/service. This includes about 6 PCB’s and 6 grow lights. I have no idea if/how well they work.
I did not find any test harnesses that one would normally have for validating and running QA on PCB’s. I can make all of it, but it will take a bit of time. This is what I was really hoping to find out of all that stuff.
I was not able to find any new in box parts such as PCB’s or probes.
That stack of smaller boxes to to the right of the grobos are all nutrients. I know because I moved them all to get things organized by myself. There are 4 pallets worth according to the consignment manifest.
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Just happen to check the app today after a long time and it works! I’m am one that’s has been able to use the web page to keep growing since to shut down.
It’s awesome that your doing this, I really hope it works out for you and everyone that uses grodo!!!
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If you have 4 of the water chillers, id be interested.
Thanks
Mr.420 ;)
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There are probably 30 or 40 water chillers. What are they used for / how do you use them?
There are a bunch of reverse osmosis filters too.
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I’m doing a security audit and fixing some of the rules to prepare for a major system migration.
There should be no interruption of service. However, if you see any intermittent 500 errors today, don’t be alarmed.
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Hey, yes depending which reverse osmosis filters are available I would be interested.
Let me know when and how you would like to work this out as I live in Ontario Canada.
As for your question, As water inside your hydroponic water reservoir rises due to heat emitted from your submersible pump or simply the ambient temperature around it, the water holds less and less dissolved oxygen. Water chillers mitigate this issue by keeping water temperatures at lower, more desirable temperatures.
I haven’t had one in a grobo so as far as that goes won’t know till I get them.
Thank you
Mr.420 ;)
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Also the water chillers need a special reservoir lid instead of the standard. It has a slot in it. @Grobo
I’ve migrated the one of the servers successfully, seems to be working fine. Now running a dedicated redis instance.
I’m going to migrate some of the other production servers over the next couple of days.
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Production servers are all migrated to new infrastructure. I can see grobos and humans communicating with the new servers. I’ll keep the old servers up for another day or two because I can see some people with cached DNS still hitting the old ones occasionally.
I got the old allgrowers forum back up over at https://allgrowers.grobo.io/ - seems to be mostly working but if you have any issues let me know.
Next I need to stop the spamming that’s happening to people that haven’t opened their emails or reported the grobo notifications as spam.
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@grobo - Are we able to properly communicate and get adjustments from the servers recipes now?
Even though my light and pump are operating properly again I am still running a 12 hour light cycle. It has not changed since my last successful grow. I have canceled and restarted the recipe twice with no change. Last time I tried this was 2 weeks ago.
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You should be able to adjust the light schedule on the website or in the app now. I’ve definitely made some improvements within the last two weeks.
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I can confirm I was able to log in with my same credentials.
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