One of the reasons the IoT is just an acronym to most people is that they can’t relate to something they can’t visualize, which makes the Green House Solution program from Digi-Key, Cypress Semiconductor, and Sparkfun a real standout. This state-of-the-art set of horticulture technology building blocks checks all the boxes: It’s relatable because you build something that produces results you can see (and taste); genuinely useful and scientifically challenging; combines “solar-free” farming with multiple high-tech technologies; and represents a new wave in the food-to-table concept.
However, one thing has been missing from their Green House Solution: A state-of-the-art LED lighting manufacturer with a product line dedicated to this application. That’s now been taken care of, as Wurth Electronik has joined this merry band. The $15 billion German company makes a diverse array of products, and one of its most recent additions is horticultural LED lighting—a key ingredient in state-of-the-art indoor growing
Greenhouse horticulture isn’t new. Millions of protected plant enclosures populate the world, and most of them have traditionally used natural light and relatively unsophisticated heating, watering, and control systems. However, thanks in part to the development of products and technology to support IoT applications, sensors, controllers, short-range RF transceivers, and other components can be networked and to autonomously expand their capabilities.
The LED Wave
The viability of LEDs in this application is relatively recent as their intensity was previously too low to be practical. However, this has been dramatically improved in recent years so that their output is comparable to high-intensity discharge (HID) light sources when used in clusters.