Supercycler Manual

First run

Creating the account, logging in, and deciding where to start. The app doesn't force you to have hardware on day one: you can walk through all of it in trial mode and connect the plug later.

1. 01Go into the app and create the account with email and password, or with Google. If it asks you for an invite code, it's because signups are closed at that moment.
2. 02The welcome screen offers you three paths: I have a wifi plug or thermometer (goes to the setup wizard), I don't have hardware yet (goes to the buying guide), and I want to try it without hardware (drops you on the dashboard with demo data).
3. 03Pick the language from the ☰ menu if you don't want Spanish: there's Spanish, English, Portuguese, and German, and it changes the whole app, not just the titles.
4. 04When you connect your first device, the app creates your first zone on its own and drops you on the dashboard.

Connecting your first device

The setup wizard is the only door for adding hardware, and it opens again every time you buy something new, from ☰ → Add device. Each brand comes in its own way, but they all end the same: the device lands in your list and you assign it to a zone.

1. 01☰ menu → Add device.
2. 02Pick the brand. The cloud ones (Tuya/SmartLife, Sonoff/eWeLink, Shelly) ask you to sign in once with that app's account: the app stays linked and from there you see all your devices.
3. 03Pick which devices you want to bring in. The ones you leave out stay in the manufacturer's cloud and don't get in the way.
4. 04Assign them to a zone and tell the app what each one is: light, exhaust fan, pump, sensor. That role is what gives you the widgets and lets the app run the equipment on its own.

What each integration can do

Anatomy of the dashboard

The dashboard is a single screen that builds itself out of what you have connected. There are no nested menus: every device you add shows up as a card ("widget") and you tap each card to configure it.

The fixed parts

Header

Logo, PRO badge, and the line ZONE · SUPERCYCLE N · WEEK N · DAY N. Tap the zone name to switch tents.

Floating brain

The round brain button opens the ☰ menu. A number on top of it means unread Brain messages. The menu doesn't close by tapping outside: you close it with the X.

Widgets

Everything else. They appear and disappear depending on the hardware the zone has — the The 22 widgets section tells you exactly what's needed for each one to show up.

The footer of each card

A colored dot (green = the data is fresh), the "X ago" since the last reading, the brand logo and the CLOUD tag or the technology icon. Before you believe a number, look at the "X ago".

Reordering and hiding cards

• You get in by holding down the logo in the header for a second.
• Drag the ⠿ handle to change the order; tap the 👁 to hide a card.
• Hidden ones sit as chips at the very bottom: tap them to bring them back.
• The order is saved per zone and per user: you can have irrigation on top in the flowering tent and light on top in the veg one.
• RESET returns to the factory order without hiding anything.

Zones: one per physical environment

A zone is an environment with its own light schedule, its own sensors and its own plugs. It's the unit of everything: alerts, the journal, spending and the grow closeout are all per zone.

1. 01Tap the zone name in the header to open the selector.
2. 02That's where all your zones are and, below them, the ones shared with you. A borrowed zone is painted a different color so you don't mistake someone else's tent for your own.
3. 03To create, rename or delete a zone: ☰ → My Lab → Overview tab.

Active zone

The one you're looking at. The app remembers it and next time opens where you left off.

Stage

Vegetative, flowering, drying or curing. Drying and curing are real stages: the environment thresholds change and the light stops driving the phase.

Paused zone

You can pause a zone (maintenance, a trip). A banner appears at the top and the automations sit still without you having to take anything apart.

Closed zone

When you close the grow, the zone is left with the "this run is over" banner and the button to start the next one.

The menu: everything that's inside it

The floating little brain opens the menu, and that's where everything that doesn't live on the dashboard is. It's worth going through it once: there are whole features you won't discover on your own because they have no card on the main screen.

1. 01Tap the little brain floating at the bottom. If it has a number on it, those are unread Brain messages.
2. 02The menu doesn't close by tapping outside: it closes with the X. That's on purpose, so it doesn't close on you while you're reading something.
3. 03The gear or your avatar open Settings, which is a second level.

What's in the main menu

Journal

The grow journal, with the tasks, the reports and the timeline.

Ask Brain

The chat with the AI that has already read your sensors.

Add device

The setup wizard. There's a guide by brand in how to connect each device.

Plant Scan

Take a photo of a plant or a trap and have it analyzed.

GROW TOOLS

PAR meter, THC/CBD meter and using this phone as a camera. It only shows up in the app, not in the browser: it needs Bluetooth.

HACK TOOLS

Genetic map and the polyploidy protocol.

Grower Arena

The grower ranking.

Activity

The log of everything the system did, with the why of each thing.

My Lab

The zone's full record: floor plan, substrate, genetics, closeout.

Support

Open a ticket. The number on the icon is unread replies.

Monitor Mode

The board for the TV. It also opens by turning your phone sideways.

And in Settings

• Edit profile, change password and switch account.
• My implant — the login with an NFC chip, Android only.
• Turn the chat's trivia on or off.
• API keys — where you see and change the keys for each integration.
• Theme — the ten color themes.
• About — version, changelog and who made it.
• Delete account, which asks you to type DELETE to confirm.

The light and its schedule

It's the most important card on the dashboard and the first one you'll set up. It shows whether the light is on, how long until the next change, and — if your fixture dims — the day's brightness curve.

What the card shows

State and countdown

ON or OFF in big type and how long until it changes. It's the grow's real clock, not the server's time.

NEXT

What time the next change is and to what state. If it says MANUAL it's because someone forced it and the schedule is paused.

Consumption

Watts, volts, amps, kWh, and plug temperature, on the models that report it. That's where the electricity spend comes from.

AUTO / MANUAL

The badge at the bottom says who's in charge right now. If it says MANUAL there's a button to go back to automatic.

Bell button

Manual light alarm: it reminds you at the time you set so you go turn it on or off by hand when there's no smart plug.

The schedule

• You set it in hours and minutes of ON and hours and minutes of OFF; you're not tied to a 24 h cycle (see Supercycles).
• The start time anchors the cycle: it's the moment the first ON begins.
• There's a schedule pause (it stays as it is until you resume it) and a temporary override (you force a state for a while and it comes back on its own).
• Every minute the app compares how the light should be with how it actually is on the equipment, and corrects it if they don't match. If your plug rebooted and came back inverted, it fixes itself.

Supercycles: cycles that don't add up to 24 h

It's the idea the product is named after. An ordinary timer forces ON + OFF to add up to 24 hours. Not here: you can run 13/13, 13/11 or any combination, and the system keeps the correct count of what day of the grow you're on.

Supercycle

One full turn of your cycle: one ON plus one OFF. If you run 13/13, a supercycle lasts 26 hours.

SC in the header

How many supercycles the grow has completed. It's the number that doesn't lie to you when the cycle isn't 24 h.

DAY

The grow's calendar day, calculated in your facility's time zone — not the server's. A grow in Madrid sees the same day as one in Buenos Aires.

Stage

Veg, flowering, drying or curing. The explicit flip overrides the light: that's why autoflowers, which run 18/6 their whole life, still show up as flowering.

Solar cycle

The schedule shifts a little every day, mimicking how the real day gets longer or shorter.

Environment: temperature, humidity and VPD

The ENVIRONMENT card is the tent's thermometer. It shows what the main sensor reports, the trend over the last few hours, and the climate equipment that depends on it.

The card's three faces

• With the sensor reporting: numbers, chart and equipment.
• Sensor assigned but no data yet: "waiting for first reading" along with the device name. If it stays like that for a long while, the problem is the connection, not the app.
• No sensor: the whole card is a button that takes you to assign one.

The three buttons in the header

🔔 Bell

Alarm history for this zone: what fired, when, and with what value.

🕐 Clock

Environment history: charts per metric, a range you pick and CSV download.

⚙ Gear

Everything on one screen: environment targets per stage, alert thresholds, sensor calibration and what each piece of equipment does.

VPD, in one line

• VPD combines temperature and humidity into a single number: how thirsty for water the air is. That is the one to watch, not humidity on its own.
• The app calculates air VPD and leaf VPD. The leaf one assumes the leaf is cooler than the air (2 °C less, by default) and it is the one that reflects what the plant feels.
• Each stage has its target band in kPa. Inside the band it goes green; outside it goes amber and tells you what to correct ("raise humidity", "lower temperature").

• These are the targets the app proposes if you have not picked a protocol. At night it drops about 3 °C and raises humidity: you can set a night offset of 1 to 6 °C with a single control, or edit the night values one by one in advanced mode.
• The VPD bands per stage are 0.4–0.8 kPa in clones, 0.8–1.2 in veg, 1.1–1.5 in flower and 1.3–1.6 in late flower. The leaf band shown is the air band minus 0.3 kPa.
• The leaf temperature offset is 2 °C by default (the leaf is cooler than the air) and you can move it between 0 and 10. You can ask for it not to be applied at night, when the leaf no longer transpires the same way.

Calibrating a sensor

• We do not ask you for an "offset": we ask you for the number your reference instrument reads. The app works out the difference on its own, and always against the raw reading — so calibrating twice does not subtract twice.
• The correction lands right away on the current value, on everything that arrives afterward, and backward through the history.
• Maximum ±10 °C and ±30 % humidity. More than that is not a miscalibrated sensor: it is a broken sensor or a typo.
• An empty field means "I am not measuring this metric right now", not "set it to zero". To remove a calibration there is the delete button.
• You cannot calibrate a frozen sensor, or one whose reading is more than 15 minutes old: you would be calibrating against a dead number.

Today's tasks and the grow journal

The journal is the grow's memory: what you did, when and with what. The tasks card on the dashboard is its short face — the three or four things that come up today.

1. 01Pick a grow protocol (☰ → Journal → ⚙ Setup). With no protocol, the tasks card shows you a recommended one as a preview, chosen based on your photoperiod.
2. 02Every day, the card lists that week's tasks with their image. Tap one to see the detail and mark it done.
3. 03Write your reports in the JOURNAL tab: text and photos. That's what later feeds the closeout report and your leaderboard score.

The journal tabs

JOURNAL

This week's tasks, the report editor with photos, the applied protocol, a summary and recent entries.

CARE

The full task library: complete, postpone, pause and undo.

FERT

Feeding plan and mix preparation.

IPM

A catalog of pest management products with their safety sheet, and the sticky traps with their trend.

CHAT

Brain, inside the journal's context.

TIMELINE

The grow's timeline: photos, videos and notes in order.

⚙ Setup

Choosing and forking protocols, and the journal settings.

Protocols: the plan the app follows for you

A protocol is the grow's recipe: which tasks come up each week, with which environment targets per stage. With no protocol chosen, the tasks card shows a suggestion and nothing gets scheduled for you. When you pick one, the app builds the schedule on its own and the journal starts to make sense.

1. 01Journal → the Setup gear, or the Choose a protocol button on the tasks card.
2. 02Pick one from the list. Each one says what it's meant for and how many tasks it brings.
3. 03It loads into the zone you have open. This week's tasks show up on the dashboard right away.
4. 04If you want to change something, fork it: you keep a copy of your own and the original stays untouched.

Alerts: only get told when it matters

A grow is lost at night and in silence. Alerts are the only thing working when you're not watching — and the only thing that ruins itself if you set it up wrong, because a hundred notifications a day turn into zero notifications read.

The four levels

• Every metric (temperature, humidity, VPD, CO₂, light, PAR, DLI, pressure, VOC, dew point) takes four thresholds: warning low, critical low, warning high, and critical high.
• You set them from the ⚙ on the Environment card, along with the targets.
• Critical wraps warning: if a value crosses straight into critical, it goes out anyway even if the warning is in cooldown.

The rules the app won't let you break

Anti-noise

Cooldown

One hour per alert, and you can change it. The alert that gets silenced still goes into the history: the only thing you don't get is the notification on your phone.

Escalation

The exception to the cooldown: if it goes from warning to critical, it rings.

Ephemeral alerts

You mark an alert as "today only" and it turns itself off.

What else gets alerted, besides the numbers

• Equipment offline and sensors with no signal.
• Relay state change: it tells you when one specific piece of equipment turns on or off.
• Light leak: the camera sees light during the night. First it learns how dark your tent is, over seven days, and only alerts after several frames in a row — it doesn't fire on a single flash.
• Pest traps: when the photos show the pest is on the rise.
• Irrigation: close failures, dry pump, watering blocked by out-of-range water.
• Platform: a cloud's quota used up, tokens about to expire, a provider's connection going down.

Where you see them

Push to your phone

The main channel. It reaches the owner and the collaborators with a role.

The bell on the card

The alarm history for that zone, computed on the spot against your thresholds.

Activity (☰ → Activity)

The log of everything the system did: what it turned on, when, and why. With a filter by range and by zone.

Telegram

Platform and support alerts. You link the account from the chat.

Environment equipment: exhaust fan, fan, humidifier

Everything that isn't the light or the pump goes here. Each device carries a role (what it is) and a mode (how it decides to turn on). With those two fields the system decides everything it does with the environment.

The roles

The modes

The by-sensor rule, field by field

Metric

Temperature, humidity, VPD or CO₂.

Turn-on value

The number at which the equipment starts. The direction (greater than / less than) is not yours to pick: it comes from the role. A humidifier always turns on *below* a value and a dehumidifier always *above*.

Hysteresis

How many points the value has to come back for the equipment to stop. Without hysteresis the equipment turns on and off every minute and breaks.

Night value

A second threshold that only applies with the light off. The tent at night is a different tent: temperature drops and relative humidity rises without anything odd going on. Available on heater, cooling, exhaust fan, humidifier and dehumidifier, and only if the zone has a main light with a schedule — with no light there's no way to know when it's night.

Per-stage presets

The same equipment with different targets in veg, flower, drying and curing.

Hysteresis floor

The system won't let you set a gap smaller than 2 °C, 5 % humidity, 0.2 kPa of VPD or 100 ppm of CO₂. Below that the relay switches every few seconds with the sensor's noise, and that breaks the device and floods the cloud. The roles that run on a timer (timed exhaust fan, fan, intake fan) don't have this limit.

Timer minimum

In timer mode, each leg runs from 5 minutes to 24 hours.

Safe mode

What the equipment does if the sensor stops sending data: stay where it is, turn off or turn on. It's what keeps it from acting blind.

Irrigation: the five modes

Of everything the app does, irrigation is the biggest, and the only one where a mistake is paid for within hours. You configure it behind the card's ⚙, and it's split into five panels: one per strategy, plus the safety caps that apply to all of them.

First of all: the header

1 · Manual

• No fields: you open the pump yourself, with the card's WATER button.
• All the safety nets still cover you: duration cap, watchdog and automatic hardware shutoff.
• To drop from an automatic mode down to manual, it asks you to confirm.

2 · Scheduled

3 · Wet/dry (by soil moisture)

4 · Crop steering

• It's the pro mode: the day is split into phases P1 (morning recharge), P2 (maintenance) and P3 (cutoff before the light goes off), plus the night with no watering.
• It has its own section: Crop steering.

5 · Guardian (water quality)

• With the block irrigation switch ON, out-of-range water stops automatic irrigation. On OFF, it only warns.
• Two cases block always, wherever the switch is: a sensor that doesn't show up, and a probe whose last reading is already more than five minutes old. There, stopping is the safe thing.
• It needs a water probe (Bluelab). Without a probe, Guardian does nothing.

The caps that apply to every mode

Why irrigation won't flood your room

It's the most carefully built part of the system, because it's the only one that can ruin a grow in twenty minutes. It's worth understanding what it's covering for you, even if you never touch it.

Four layers, independent of each other

1 · The hardware

Before opening, the system arms the plug's own auto-off. If it can't arm it, it doesn't open. An internet outage, a server crash or a hung cloud won't leave the pump running.

2 · The watchdog

It checks that the valve really is open when it should be, and closes it when the time runs out.

3 · Reconciliation

Every half minute it compares what the system believes is open against what the device actually says, and corrects it.

4 · The command filter

It stops out-of-range durations and commands before they reach the relay.

On top of that

• Sentinel for unexpected relays: every 30 seconds it checks whether an irrigation relay was left on that the system wasn't expecting. If it's a ghost of its own, it closes it. If you watered from the manufacturer's app, it warns you, cuts off at the limit and pauses the automatics for two hours so the water isn't doubled up.
• Dry-run pump guard: it learns the pump's normal power draw; if it drops below that twice in a row it cuts off, cancels the watering that was coming and warns you. It catches an empty tank, a disconnected hose or a jammed pump.
• Recovery after a crash: if the service restarts with a valve open, it closes it on startup and restores the day's counters — a restart doesn't hand out extra waterings.
• Closing always gets through: a turn-off command never sits waiting behind a retry.

The circuit's SAFETY SCORE

• A 0-100 score and an A-D letter per pump, recalculated every day over the last 30.
• It looks at how many times the close was confirmed, whether the hardware's auto-off has been tested, whether the device answers on the local network, relays that were left on by themselves, failed closes and dry starts.
• With no tested auto-off, your score stays at 55 — meaning you don't get past a C no matter how perfect everything else is.
• The score comes with one concrete tip for raising it, the most important one first.

The messages you'll see

"Irrigation is paused"

Failures in the manufacturer's cloud. The panel tells you the reason and how many retries are left.

"The plug is offline"

The engine can't water through something that isn't answering it.

"The valve didn't physically open"

The system looks at whether the valve actually opened, not at whether the command was sent.

"EMERGENCY: the pump didn't respond to the close"

The one case where the system asks you to go unplug it by hand. Go.

Eyes: the grow's camera

Eyes turns an old Android into the tent's camera. It's not just watching: it counts the plants, draws their outline, measures how much space they take up and builds the timelapse with the sensor numbers from each moment on top.

1. 01Install the Eyes app on the phone you're going to leave inside (☰ → GROW TOOLS → use this phone as a camera, from the app only).
2. 02Pair it with the QR code the dashboard shows you. The phone gets linked to one zone.
3. 03Done: the AI EYES card appears on the dashboard with the latest photo.

What it does, beyond taking photos

Plant count and outline

The AI cuts out each plant and works out how much of the photo it takes up. That way you compare growth day by day no matter the resolution or the camera distance. Violet = normal; orange = delayed growth.

Timelapse with the data on top

Video of the day, the week or the whole grow, with the temperature, humidity, VPD, day and equipment status from that exact frame, in sync.

Light leak detection

It learns what your tent looks like in the dark over seven days and warns you if light gets in at night. It rules out cameras with infrared and needs several frames in a row: it doesn't trip on a single flash.

Night series and live view

WATCH LIVE button on the card, and BRAIN LAB for the large player.

• An IP camera over FTP works too: you upload the photos to the server and they land on the same timeline.
• Old photos delete themselves so the disk doesn't fill up. A timelapse that's already been generated survives.
• If the phone runs out of battery or loses WiFi, the card says so with the "X ago" — it doesn't pass off an old photo as a new one.

Brain: asking someone who has seen your sensors

Brain is the app's chat, and what makes it different from any other one is that it comes into the conversation with a snapshot of the real state of your zone. Ask it why the VPD is running high and it answers with your numbers, not with generalities.

What it can do

Answer with context

It sees your zone: sensors, equipment, stage, waterings. It calls you by your nickname.

Cite documentation

It has an agronomy knowledge base in several languages: it cites, it doesn't make things up.

Speak first

It sends proactive messages when it sees something odd or something left unconfigured. The number on the little brain is how many you haven't read.

Get hands-on

It doesn't just talk: it proposes configuration changes and applies them, turns a specific outlet on or off, and proposes improvements to your protocols. It shows you everything it touches before doing it.

Live voice

You talk, it listens and answers out loud, and you can interrupt it mid-sentence. Handy when your hands are busy.

Trivia

A quiz game inside the chat. You turn it on and off from ☰ → Settings.

Plant Scan and sticky traps

Take a photo and ask what's wrong with the plant. It's the quick diagnosis tool, and the only one in the app that works well without a single device connected.

The modes

The trap card

• It shows up as soon as you scan a trap for the first time. There's no hardware to set up.
• It shows severity, the approximate count, a trend across the last scans and the trap color you scanned.
• It always compares against the previous scan of the same color, so don't mix the yellow one with the blue one in the same series.
• If severity escalates, an alert goes out.

Fertilization plan and IPM catalog

Two journal tabs that work together: in FERT you set how you water and with what, and IPM is the pest prevention strategy. Both generate tasks that then show up in the day's agenda.

FERT

• Irrigation strategy: manual or automatic. On manual you set the frequency and the volume yourself.
• Substrate: soil, coco, hydro. It changes the recommendations and the notes the app gives you on the moisture chart.
• The fertilizer plan with the brands and products from the catalog.

IPM

• You choose a strategy — organic, mixed — and each one comes with its own batch of scheduled preventive tasks.
• Every product in the catalog has its safety sheet: pre-harvest interval, whether it's safe up to harvest, how it's applied.
• It works together with the dashboard's sticky trap: if the trap escalates, you already have the protocol loaded.

Grower Arena: the ranking

A ranking among growers that measures how tidily you run your grow, not how much you harvest. You join if you want and you leave whenever you want. The good part is that the math is published: you can see exactly what counts and what does not.

What it measures

• Environmental quality — how much of the time you kept VPD inside the band.
• Consistency — how many days you monitored and how much data there is.
• Documentation — journal entries, with a bonus if they carry a note or a photo.
• Discipline — the tasks you did against the ones you skipped, and what time you did them against the scheduled time.
• How much you use the assistant and how big the grow is.

My Lab: the zone's complete record

Everything the dashboard doesn't show because it doesn't change every day: the tent's dimensions, the substrate, the genetics, the fixtures, the physical layout and the team. It opens from ☰ → My Lab.

The tabs

Overview

Day, week, plants, genetics. Climate with average temperature, hot spot and humidity. Container, mix, target EC/pH, mini layout with area and volume, and free-form notes for the zone.

Layout

The physical map of the tent, draggable. Layers for heat map, equipment heat, thermometers, fixtures, plants, trays and doors. Four maps: thermal, humidity, CO₂ and soil.

Lighting

Where you enter your lights: brand, model, watts and quantity. You can import them from your plugs, or measure the real watts if the device has a meter. It calculates efficiency, power density and coverage in m².

Substrate

Where the roots live: system, container or bed with dimensions, mix, amendments, condition and reuse, and target EC/pH. It has a basic and an advanced mode.

Genetics

The strains in the grow, with a search against a catalog of tens of thousands of varieties. Per batch: type, material, number of plants, phenotype and notes. Each strain has its own color on the layout.

Eyes Lab

This zone's camera; if you don't have one yet, you link it here.

Power Cost

Consumption and cost. See Electricity cost.

Share

The team and the permissions. See Sharing the zone.

History and Closeout

Previous cycles and the closeout wizard.

Ghost Zone

Hide a zone behind an NFC chip. It only works in the Android app.

Sharing the zone and working as a team

If someone else walks into your room, it's worth having them in the app. Sharing a zone gives you a collaborator who sees the environment, reports tasks under their name and can't reconfigure anything on you. Seeing and operating are different permissions.

The two permissions you can give

The invite link

• You choose permission, expiration (no limit, 7 days or 30 days) and uses (no limit, or from 1 to 20).
• It gives you the URL and a QR code to scan. Save it right there: for security it isn't shown again.
• There's only one active link per zone: generating another one replaces the previous one. Whoever already got in stays in.
• If you revoke the link nobody new gets in, but whoever is already in stays in. To kick someone out, remove them from the list: they stop seeing the zone instantly.

Temporary edit permission

• A collaborator can ask for permission to operate equipment — turn on, turn off, manual watering.
• You see the request and give them 1 hour, 24 hours or 7 days. Or you deny it.
• While it's valid, the collaborator sees an EDITOR chip with the expiration time.
• You revoke it with one tap and they stop operating instantly.

Collaboration score

• It runs from 1 to 10, is recalculated every day over the last 7, and needs two weeks to show a trend.
• A metric with no data doesn't lower the score: it's left out and its weight is split among the rest. Nobody loses points for not having sensors.
• It's private to the zone owner. It comes with a report written by Brain in HR tone.

Power Cost

How much power the grow uses and what it costs you in your currency. You open it from ☰ → My Lab → Power Cost, but the screen is global: it shows you all your zones together, your own and shared ones, even if you came in from one tent.

The four periods

• Day — 24 hours, one point per hour.
• Week — one point per hour.
• Month — one point per day.
• Cycle — from when the active cycle started. It is the only one that is not a fixed span: it stretches with your grow.

Measured, partial or estimated

• An estimate does not go wrong at random: it goes wrong the same way every time.
• Partial is the one worth watching out of the corner of your eye: it is not a money issue, it is a plug that is losing its connection.
• When measurement and estimate overlap, the measurement wins.
• The warm band on the chart marks the actual time the lights were on, not the configured schedule. That difference is information, not a bug in the chart.

Your rate

• You enter currency, kWh price and, if you want, off-peak and peak time slots (they can cross midnight; the rest of the day uses the base price).
• With no rate entered, the system uses your country's average residential cost in dollars — which is not your rate.
• Equipment with no meter and no watts entered stays out of the total. You type in the watts and past usage shows up retroactively, because the history is built from the hours it was on.

AI VPD: when Brain watches humidity

The AI VPD card isn't just a number: it watches how your room behaves and tells you what to adjust. It appears as soon as the zone has a sensor that measures humidity, and it starts in learning mode.

1. 01Open the AI VPD card on the dashboard and tap the gear.
2. 02If the per-stage targets are enough for you, don't touch anything: they're already loaded.
3. 03If you want your own, check use custom targets and edit the ranges for air VPD, leaf VPD, temperature and humidity.

Closing the grow and the history

When you harvest, you close the cycle and you are left with a record that stays forever: the whole cycle's climate frozen, the yield, the genetics and the length in days and in supercycles. It is what makes the next grow start out knowing something.

The steps, grouped

• Closing is by batch: you can close some genetics and leave others standing.
• You can edit it again: closing is not throwing away the key.
• From the last step you start the next cycle, which leaves the zone clean without deleting the history.

The 22 widgets and why you're missing one

The dashboard has no "enable widgets" screen: each card appears on its own when the zone meets its condition. If a widget isn't there, it's because the hardware is missing or the role is. Here's the complete list with the exact condition for each one.

The ones almost everyone sees

The ones that depend on hardware

What they look like

Secondary, dimmable, and UV lights

A zone can have more than one light, each with its own regime. The main one defines the photoperiod; the rest hang off it or run on their own.

The presets for a secondary light

Declared photoperiod and effective photoperiod

• A secondary light with an offset stretches the tent's real photoperiod. A real case: the zone declared 16/16 and the tent was doing 17/15 because one light opened an hour earlier.
• That's why the card shows the effective photoperiod when it differs from the declared one.
• Far-red and UV-C pulses don't count as stretching as long as they last 30 minutes or less: they step on the dark on purpose.

Brightness curve

Crop steering

The pro irrigation mode. Instead of "water when it drops below X", it splits the day into phases and uses dryback — how much the substrate dries down — as the lever to push the plant toward vegetative growth or toward dense flower.

The phases of the day

P1 · Ramp-up

It starts a few minutes after the light comes on and brings the substrate to field capacity, with short shots and pauses to measure.

P2 · Maintenance

During the day, it holds a moisture floor with smaller shots.

P3 · Cutoff

It stops watering however many minutes you choose before the light goes off, so the substrate dries down overnight.

Night

No watering. The overnight dryback is the goal, not a problem.

Vegetative or generative

Per-phase values you'll run into

Shadow: try it without watering

• Crop steering starts in shadow mode: it calculates and logs what it *would have* watered, without opening a valve.
• To switch to real watering it asks for three complete light cycles logged, the zone qualifying, and the targets loaded. Until they're there, the button won't let you tap it and tells you why.
• With autopilot on, it makes the switch by itself as soon as those conditions are met, notes it in the feed, and goes back to shadow on its own if things turn ugly.
• Several safety cutoffs in the same day drop the zone to shadow. Cutoffs less than 30 minutes apart count as a single incident: one odd spike from the probe won't drop your zone.

The brakes

Research tools

What you don't need in order to grow, but what makes the second grow better than the first: comparing against the real climate of an origin, looking at where a genetic line comes from, measuring with instruments and competing with other growers.

Time Machine

• You pick a landrace origin and the app builds that place's climate curve, scaled to the length of your cycle.
• Previewing writes nothing: it draws day and night temperature and the summary of light hours per stage.
• Apply loads those targets into your zone, with a confirmation.
• Compare overlays the target curve against what your tent actually measured.
• Undo returns the zone to how it was.

Genetic map

• You start from a strain and see where it comes from: origin landraces with their weight, place and country of creation, and the real climate of that origin.
• It connects with Time Machine: from the map you can clone that origin's climate into your tent.
• When the data only got as far as country-level precision, it shows the country and doesn't invent a place. As for you, the app locates you by IP and only down to the country: it never stores coordinates.

Hack Tools · polyploidization

Grow Tools

• PAR measurement with a VBR-100 meter over Bluetooth: it opens a live measurement screen so you can map the tent.
• THC/CBD measurement with a Purpl Pro.
• Use this phone as a camera: the setup flow for Eyes.

Grower Arena

• Two views: weekly (the last 7 days, on a rolling window) and all-time, plus the hall of fame with each week's champions.
• Eight metrics: overall, VPD in band, days monitored, journal entries, AI usage, tasks completed, light punctuality and setup improvements. Plus a team ranking for collaborators.
• If you don't have data for a metric you don't enter that ranking: it doesn't put you last, it leaves you out of that table.
• What's different: it rewards being on time when you do it by hand — it compares the real time of each action against the scheduled one. It only adds, never subtracts.
• You can change your name and avatar, and opt out of the ranking with a checkbox.
• There's a public page explaining how each metric is calculated.

Ghost Zone: hiding a zone

A zone in ghost mode stops showing up: it's not in the zone selector, or the editor, or the phone widget, or the Stream Deck. It comes back when you tap the NFC implant. It's a tab in My Lab.

Themes, monitor, language and access

The app lets itself be rearranged quite a bit. None of this changes how the system grows, but it changes quite a lot about how you live with it.

Themes

• You change it from ☰ → Settings → Theme, or by tapping the logo in the header to cycle from one to the next.
• The theme follows you into Plant Scan, Grower Arena and the rest of the screens.
• Shared zones have their own palettes instead of themes, so you can tell at a glance that you are in someone else's tent.

Monitor Mode

• A landscape board with one panel per zone and the vitals in large type, with a traffic light per metric.
• You get in from ☰ → Monitor Mode, or by turning the phone sideways.
• When you leave it, it goes back to where you were, not to the home screen.

Language

• Four languages: Spanish, English, Portuguese and German. You switch them from the ☰ menu itself.
• If a translation is missing, it falls back to Spanish instead of showing the technical key.
• Numbers and dates are formatted according to the language.

API keys

• It stores the credentials for each cloud (Tuya, eWeLink, Shelly, Bluelab, Pulse, Zigbee) with a health status: valid, suspect or invalid.
• You can test them without saving them.
• When a key dies, the app flags "you need to link again" instead of going quiet.
• You cannot delete a key that has equipment assigned to it: it tells you how many.

Ways in from outside the app

Android widgets

Three widgets for the home screen: one zone, the zone list and the day's tasks. They use the same session as the app, so they go dark on their own when you log out. They refresh every half hour.

Stream Deck

A plugin for the physical key controller: you see the environment and you act on up to four pieces of equipment per zone. It gets in with a key you can revoke whenever you want: you generate it and change it from the app.

Telegram

You link the account with a short code and you get alerts there.

Deleting the account

• From ☰ → Settings → Delete account. You have to type DELETE and confirm.
• If you cannot log in, there is a public page to request it: we check who you are and do it within seven days.
• Everything gets deleted and it is irreversible: profile, credentials for the clouds you connected, historical readings, journal, photos and logs.

Support: when you have to write to a human

Brain answers now and that's where it ends. A ticket stays alive, with a state, until someone works on it. You open it from ☰ → Support.

Opening one

• You pick a zone (it can be a shared one, or none), a category (equipment, sensors, irrigation, light, app, account, or other), urgency, subject, and description.
• You can attach up to 5 photos per message and 20 over the ticket's whole life.
• Limits: 5 tickets a day.

What travels with the ticket

• A frozen snapshot of your zone's state at that moment: day and phase, effective photoperiod, protocol, the equipment with its role and what state it should be in versus what it reports, each sensor's last reading with how many seconds old it is, the last ten alerts, and data about your app.
• You can see it before you send it, in the "what we send to support" dropdown.

The states

• Urgency doesn't change the fix priority: it changes how we find out. High and critical notify instantly; medium and low get grouped into a digest twice a day.
• The notices go by email and, if you have it on, by notification. Replying to the email doesn't work: you have to go in through the link.
• The closing report has five parts: what you reported, what we found, what we did, what's left for you to do, and how long it took.
• A resolved ticket closes itself after 7 days with no activity.

Glossary

The terms that show up in the app and don't always mean what they look like.

Supercycle

One full turn of your light cycle: one ON plus one OFF. If you run 13/13, it lasts 26 hours. SC in the header counts how many the grow has completed.

Zone

A physical space with its own schedule, its sensors and its plugs. The unit for everything: alerts, journal, power cost and closeout are all per zone.

Role

What a device is to the system: light, exhaust fan, pump, sensor. It's what makes the widgets appear and decides what gets sent to it.

Primary sensor

The ambient sensor the big numbers, the alerts and the rules come from. One per zone, and never a soil probe.

VPD

Vapor pressure deficit: how thirsty for water the air is. It combines temperature and humidity into one number.

Leaf VPD

VPD calculated with the temperature of the leaf, which is cooler than the air. It's what the plant feels.

Dew point

The temperature at which the air starts to condense. If the leaf is below it, there's water on the leaf.

Hysteresis

The distance between the value that turns a piece of equipment on and the one that turns it off. Without it, the equipment turns on and off every minute.

Dryback

How much the substrate dries between waterings, in moisture points. The main lever of crop steering.

Wet/dry

Watering by soil moisture: wait until it hits the minimum, fill up to the target, and let it dry.

Shadow mode

The system calculates and logs what it *would* have done, without acting on anything. It's how crop steering gets tested and how AI VPD works today.

Hardware auto-off

The plug's own timer. It's the safety layer that keeps working even if the internet, the server or the manufacturer's cloud goes down.

Secure Run

Writing the schedule into the firmware of the plug, as a backup. Only on the models that support it, and not on the outlets of a multichannel device.

By hand

A light mode in which no automation touches it. Different from override, which overrides a schedule that still exists, and from manual light, which is a light with no hardware, set up so the zone has a photoperiod.

Effective photoperiod

The tent's real photoperiod, which can differ from the declared one if a secondary light stretches the window.

Protocol

A plan of tasks and targets per stage. The built-in ones can't be edited: the moment you touch one, the app creates your copy.

Collaborator

Someone you share a zone with. They watch, and if you want, they report too. Operating equipment is a separate, temporary permission.