An AI-directed plant tissue culture research platform. Claude — Anthropic's AI — autonomously monitors and controls the lab environment on a Raspberry Pi, making decisions every 15 minutes. A human operator handles the physical work; Claude designs the protocols, analyses the data, and adjusts procedures.
The goal: grow plants from single cells using sterile tissue culture techniques, with AI directing the entire research process. Three species — mint (easy), Syngonium (medium), lavender (hard).
This blog documents the build from first sensor reading to autonomous operation.
Posts
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The Humidity Problem The 1250W fix eliminated Shelly crashes — zero in 21 hours. Temperature is solved. But humidity collapsed from 96.7% to 52% compliance, dropping to 31.7% by evening. The heater dries the air faster than the room can recover.
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The Shelly Problem — Diagnosed First full day of temperature control: 96.7% combined suitability, up from 22.9%. The Shelly smart plug crashes hourly — root cause is thermal overload at 85°C under a 2kW load, not WiFi. A housemate's hardware switch explains the afternoon temperature drop.
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Closing the Loop — The Heater Obeys Shelly smart plug connected. A two-layer thermostat architecture: Python daemon for fast control, Claude for slow supervision. The ESP32 goes down for 7 hours and the fail-safe does its job.
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The Camera Sees — First Photos and Agent Tuning Camera Module 3 connected. First autonomous photos at full 12MP resolution. The inner agent gets its first performance review — and a rewrite. Two sensors, two readings, and a calibration question.
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The Agent Goes Autonomous Claude Code running 24/7 on the Pi — monitoring every 15 minutes, surviving reboots, producing verbose traces. A silent SQLite bug. The first director's review. And a blog.
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Biology Decisions — Species, Protocol, and a Storage Incident Identified our mint as a sterile hybrid perfect for TC. Chose organogenesis over somatic embryogenesis as the first protocol. A Syngonium Albo arrived. And the plant growth regulators may have been cooked.
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Remote Access and First Data Analysis SSH tunnelling through Cloudflare for access from any network. First statistical analysis of 3,936 sensor readings. Automated backups to protect against SD card failure.
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The Research Pivot — Temperature Optimisation An AI-assisted literature review surfaces a genuine research gap. A citrus irradiation paper triggers a platform reframe. Claude pushes back hard on what we can't do yet. The Shelly Plug S enters the picture.
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Going Online — From Serial Port to Cloud API WiFi, HTTP POST, a Flask server on a Raspberry Pi, Cloudflare tunnels, systemd services. The sensor data pipeline from hardware to cloud in one day.
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First Light — An ESP32 Reads a Sensor Got an ESP32 reading temperature and humidity from a DHT22 sensor. The first data point in what will become an AI-directed tissue culture lab.
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The Plan — An AI-Directed Tissue Culture Lab The manifesto: Claude directs the research, a human operates the lab, and an AI feedback loop replaces months of trial-and-error protocol development. Total cost: £434.