When it comes to making good decisions the more information you have to hand to support those decisions the better. Of course these days the volume of data can be overwhelming making it almost useless for less than the hardcore data junkies.
How does someone handle 5+ million data points and make any sense of it (good luck using Excel), a fun challenge we’ve been working on. This is not really anything new, data science has this challenge all the time the answer lies in the world of data visualisation, being able to identify anomalies and issues in data is much easier when done graphically.
As an example, I find my plants don’t seem to be performing as well other growers are telling me they should be performing and I’m not quite sure why or what I need to do.
A good start would be looking at my environment to see if there is anything that stands out when compared to everyone else and then work further up the problem solving chain from there.
So do this I need to have a pool of data from other grows that I can compare it to, and I just want to see what %RH and Temperature most people are running at and then be able to overlay my data on top and see where it falls.
The chart below is the distribution and density of %RH and Temperature from 57 different sensor units across 20 different growing locations for a total of just over 5 million data points collected over a 20 day period.
The darker the area the higher the number of points that fall in this area, and it looks like roughly 50% to 60% RH and 23 to 25 C Temperature range is the “sweet” spot or at least the most common.
Now thats great and I can take a look at what my environment readings are and see if I am away from the norm or not. Nicer if I could see that data on the chart too.
Now that quickly highlights that the temperature and humidity in my environment seems to be off with the temperature being off by the greatest amount. So chances are by increasing my temperature I will see the required improvement in my plants health and growth.
Maybe you have a number of seed testers and you want to get a quick overview of how each one managed their grow environment for the duration of the testing cycle so you can better understand the difference in results. (each colour represents a different grow cycle)
At P&L Grow Systems we are working on democratising access to data insights and analytics which are normally out of reach to the average grower. If you would like to know more please get in touch.
Pete