@speck_c Oh wow! I’ll be interested to see what you and your students come up with - definitely be sure to share the progress! Even if it’s just a photo or two, I’m sure there are other teachers using the MV1s @DrDonnaJ @cregini who would be curious to see your engineering project! If we can help by sharing CAD models for anything - let us know.
I will add a new recipe for you (and anyone else with an MV1) by Monday, based on the instructions you provided. You can then use the MV1s user interface to “create a new trial” which will begin using the settings defined in that recipe. I’ll share with you a copy of that “recipe” - as I did with the Tomatosphere project.
I love the solution that Fast Plants recommends to maintain a constant amount of light throughout the experiment - which is using books to keep the tray 10 cm below the lights. There’s no way they could provide such a clear timeline for growing the plants (day 22, expect ___) unless the Day Light Integral (intensity*duration) is consistent across school experiments. Knowing that, I’d like to get you thinking about how we could solve this same problem (keep the light intensity the same, despite the plants getting taller) - to further improve upon this recipe in the Spring semester. I think that some of the problems you’ve been experiencing (temperature fluctuation day/night) can be solved using the MV1s features (heater) this semester. So something to think about for next semester, is that we can also control light intensity throughout the lifecycle by creating multiple “phases” within a recipe. Bottom line: we can adjust the light intensity to maintain a constant amount of light throughout the entire plant lifecycle. To do this though, I’d need to know the exact lights you’ve been using (I see that they recommend two from Carolina) so I can reverse engineer their recommended DLI. Here’s a visual that explains how you can adjust the lights to slowly increase the DLI - your goal is the opposite, adjust them to maintain a constant DLI:
