Show HN: Cannabis Irrigation Automation Tool Built in Svelte

Hey all,

The company I work for did an automation job at a large cannabis cultivation facility last year. In the process we had to build some custom tools including a fertigation routine/scheduler with a proportional balancing. We decided to put a version online in case any other cultivators would find it handy. I chose Svelte for this project partly because when I built (for the third time) this routine scheduler, it was a great fit for reactive programming techniques. (Unsurprising, the original prototype was made by a brilliant controls engineer using excel).

Previously I did a version in vanilla JS, MDC Web, and Knockout. Knockout is awesome and doesn’t mind circular references, which are explicitly forbidden in Svelte, and were very convenient for this tool. At the same time we were attracted to Svelte/SvelteKit for all the modern features. Over on the Svelte Discord they immediately explained to me how to get around the circular reference limitation, the community is super helpful! I was able to put the bones of this together using Svelte in a couple of hours, during a meeting, while teaching myself the language. The same thing took days in vanilla JS.

I find Svelte a joy to work with.

SvelteKit had a slightly longer ramp up time, just getting used to the toolchain. Once up and running, the developer experience is still pretty great. The page based routing and whatnot is killer. There are some difficult moments trying to convince the framework not to use SSR, or to work around what seems like arbitrary SSR, but hey … it’s in beta.

Anyway, maybe someone will find this cool, feel free to ask any questions,

Thanks!