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.