The SEIN Automation Stack
A soil moisture sensor that reads 24% is just a number. What makes it useful is the system around it — the infrastructure that receives that number, compares it to a threshold, and opens the right irrigation valve for the right duration. The infrastructure that logs the reading, shows it on a dashboard, and sends an alert if it drops to 15% at 2pm. Most of that infrastructure, if you buy it commercially, comes with strings attached. Cloud subscriptions. Proprietary APIs. Systems that stop working when the vendor changes their pricing or shuts down a service. We’ve built our own — open, local, and designed to outlast any company’s business model.
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Reading the Air
Plants don’t read thermometers. They don’t respond to temperature alone, or humidity alone. They respond to the relationship between them — specifically, to the difference between the vapour pressure of water inside their leaves and the vapour pressure of the surrounding air. That difference has a name: Vapour Pressure Deficit, or VPD. It’s the metric that determines whether a plant is actively growing, conserving water, or quietly stressed. It drives transpiration, nutrient uptake, and stomatal behaviour. Commercial greenhouse operators have used VPD as their primary climate metric for decades. Most small-scale growers — market gardeners, hobby glasshouse operators, urban food producers — have never encountered it, because the equipment to measure and act on it has cost thousands of dollars and required specialist configuration.
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LoRaWAN Irrigation Control
South Australia is the driest state on the driest inhabited continent. We don’t have water to waste. Most irrigation systems ignore this. They run on timers. Tuesday at 6am, eight minutes, regardless of whether it rained yesterday, whether the soil is still saturated from last week, whether the leaves are already wet and adding more moisture would invite fungal disease. Industrial schedules applied to living systems. We’ve spent decades building agricultural infrastructure that treats water as if it were infinite.
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The Sourdough Keeper: A Starter Companion
To bake sourdough is to be a custodian of a living thing. The starter—that bubbling, breathing culture of wild yeast and bacteria—is the heart of the loaf. It’s a partner in the baking process, with its own rhythms, needs, and moods. And as any baker knows, its vitality is profoundly tied to temperature. The Baker’s Dilemma Our modern kitchens are rarely the ideal environment for this ancient lifeform. Temperatures swing with the seasons, the time of day, or whether the oven has been on. In winter, a starter can be sluggish, refusing to rise with the vigour needed for a great bake. In summer, it can ferment too quickly, becoming overly acidic and losing its strength.
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DIY Wireless Fermentation Controller
Fermentation is a dance between control and surrender. We create the conditions, add the culture, and then step back to let an invisible world of microbes work its magic. But any fermenter knows that the environment is everything. The wild sourdough that thrives in a cool, humid kitchen might struggle in a warm, dry one. The perfect kimchi requires a consistent chill. A home-brewed beer like a lager demands a precise, unwavering cold fermentation, while an ale needs a steady warmth. The mash for a future distillation, perhaps using surplus lemons or plums from your own garden, needs to be kept at an optimal temperature to ensure a clean ferment, free of off-flavours. Even a simple Hard Lemon brew can turn if the temperature swings too wildly.
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