DSC-BRAIN USER GUIDE · START HERE
Glossary
Every term the dashboard uses, in plain words.
● verified for 9.0.0 · corrected for 9.8.9 on 2026-10-01
● first mirrored 2026-09-15
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Brain | The Raspberry Pi (the Pi) that runs DSC-Brain: the service that decides what the room should be doing, and the dashboard you use to see it. |
| Hub | The one DSC-made controller with the fan, lamp-dimmer and sensor channels. It keeps the room safe from its own sensors and clock even if the brain is off. |
| Probe | A soil probe (moisture, EC, pH, soil temperature) that reports to the hub and the brain. Each probe can be assigned to a plant. |
| Smart plug | A plug you can switch from software. The four Sonoff plugs run the heater, heat mat, humidifier and dehumidifier; Zigbee and Tuya plugs run other loads. |
| Control panel | The optional DSC-Control screen for reading the room and nudging it without a phone. A kit without one is not faulty. |
| Fleet | The hub, probes, plugs and panel together: the devices that report to the brain. |
| Kit card | The card that lists your kit's own addresses and hotspot name. This guide never prints them; they are also under Settings › Network. |
| ESP-NOW | A short-range radio link between DSC devices. The probes and the panel use it to reach the hub. |
| PWM | How the hub sets a fan's speed or a lamp's brightness: a fast on/off signal whose on-share sets the level. The dashboard shows it as a percent. |
| Zigbee / Tuya | Two ways smart sensors and plugs connect. Zigbee is a low-power radio that needs the USB coordinator on the Pi; Tuya (SmartLife) devices are Wi-Fi devices the brain drives directly over your network. |
| Desk | A dashboard screen of the older kind: Overview (now Today), Climate, Root, Light, Plants, CannaLib, Logs, Alerts (now Issues), Kit (now Devices) and Twin. The top bar now shows five items instead: Today, Spaces, Devices, Issues and Settings, with a More sheet for Twin, CannaLib and Logs. Desks are what you are looking at, never which tent. |
| Today | The landing screen, formerly the Overview desk: what needs a hand now, one card per zone and the Overnight panel. |
| Space | A place you open from Spaces: the room, a tent, a space nested in a tent such as a clone dome, or a curing chamber. Each has a page with four sections: Reading, Want, What drives it and What you can do. The older screens and Settings › Zones call it a zone. |
| Issues | The top bar item and screen that list everything needing a look, in four tiers: Safety, Needs attention soon, Affects the grow and Housekeeping. Formerly the Alerts desk. See Issues: the one icon. |
| Device class | A kind of device, such as a fan or a humidifier. The planner and the Who is in charge screen work class by class. See Devices: classes, ports and placement and Who is in charge and rolling back. |
| Owner | Whoever has a device or a space at the moment: the automatic control, you after a Take over, or a rule. |
| Planner | The part of the brain that works out, for each class of device, what it would do and why. It works alongside; the hub's own control still runs the room. The Why panel on Today shows its reasons. See The planner: what it decides and why. |
| Timed run | Running a device for a while from its tile (Run for a while) or its page: you pick what it should do and for how long, and you can hand it back at any time. If the new engine does not switch that kind of device, the receipt reads Planned only and nothing is sent. See Timed runs: Run for a while. |
| Zone | A room or tent. This rig has the room, the 4×8 tent and the 2×4 tent. Climate, Root, Light and Twin carry a zone strip; the chosen zone rides in the URL as ?zone=. Zones you add yourself, such as a curing chamber, are created under Settings › Zones (Add a zone). |
| Want / Got / Need | Target band / measured value / the gap and what is being done about it. |
| Ladder | The hub's fixed order for asking appliances to act: dehumidifier, humidifier, heater, cooling, heat mat, each gated by reality checks, a failsafe and a minimum off-time. |
| Full Auto | The hub ladder runs and the brain chases Want with fans and demand. The normal state. |
| Manual takeover | The state where you own every fan and appliance because you took them all over. The brain stops re-asserting Want until you hand them back, and Climate shows a red Manual takeover banner while it lasts. Temporary by design. |
| Take over / Hand back | Take over makes one device yours, so a flip by hand stays until you press Hand back. Every device tile has it, and a tent's space page has Take over with the tent's name for the whole tent, with a How long choice. Taking the fans over shows FANS: YOURS on the headers and frees the fan sliders. |
| Failsafe | The hub's emergency state when it no longer trusts its own climate sensors. Everything risky goes off. Always a critical alert; cannot be disabled. |
| Min-off | The minimum time an appliance must stay off before it may be asked again (protects compressors and avoids hunting). Tiles glow blue while in min-off. |
| Demand | The hub's per-appliance please run switch. Sonoff plugs mirror it. |
| Reality gate | A check that an appliance actually did something before the ladder escalates (a dehumidifier that runs without moving RH trips ineffective). |
| Held / HELD | A reading shown at its last good value because the source has gone quiet. Not a live number. |
| Stale | A reading older than the horizon the kit trusts. Control logic treats it as missing. |
| Provenance | Where a number came from: a raw device entity, a computed value, or a catalog. Turn on Provenance mode under Settings › System › Developer to see it. |
| INVENTED row | A settings row for a feature the software understands but the rig cannot do yet. Rendered dashed with a possible with… hint. Hidden unless enabled under Developer. |
| RH, EC and pH | Relative humidity (percent); electrical conductivity of a feed or runoff solution in mS/cm, which tells you how much is dissolved in it; and how acidic or alkaline that solution is. |
| VPD | Vapour pressure deficit in kPa: how hard the air pulls water from a leaf. Computed from temperature and RH with a leaf-to-air offset. Check your VPD in the free calculator. |
| PPFD | Photosynthetic photon flux density in µmol/m²/s: how much usable light reaches the canopy each second. A maker PPFD map is the fixture's published pattern of it. Typical targets by stage are in the PPFD chart by growth stage. |
| DLI | Daily light integral in mol/m²/day. The dashboard's number is an estimate from the fixture's maker PPFD map, canopy distance, dim level and hours. |
| Photoperiod | The lights-on window per tent. The hub keeps the clock; the brain and you set it. |
| Manual light hold | Freezes the hub-dimmed 4×8 lamp at its current on/off and brightness and stops the schedule moving it until cleared. |
| Catch-up | The hub making up missed lit hours after an outage or hold. Releasing a hold during catch-up turns the lamp ON. |
| SF1000 | The hub-dimmed lamp output, printed as SF1000 on the Light desk (the hub itself calls it SF1000 Dimmer). It drives one of the two 4×8 lamps; the other 4×8 lamp is switched by a smart plug on the hub's clock. |
| Dry-back | How far substrate moisture falls between irrigations, per crop-steering phase P1–P3. |
| Probe station / idle home | Where a probe sits when it is not in a plant (the soil-test dock). Separate from plant assignment. |
| Roster | The list of plants, up to 10 slots. A plant may have a probe assigned, be detached, or be retired. |
| Stage | Expected grow stage from days since sprout and the flip date, scaled by the strain's catalog flowering time. It is a calendar expectation, not a live plant state. |
| Flip date | The day a photoperiod plant went to 12/12. Stamped automatically at the veg→flower crossing, editable on the plant panel. |
| CannaLib | The strain catalog. Three tiers: online API, on-Pi corpus, curated local YAML. Lights, equipment and nutrients now come from DSC-KitLib and DSC-NuteLib. |
| DSC-KitLib / DSC-NuteLib | The product libraries kept on the Pi: KitLib for lights (with maker PPFD maps) and equipment, NuteLib for nutrients, feed charts and growing media. Updated separately from the brain under Settings › Integrations › Libraries. |
| Journal / grow log | Per-plant, per-tent, per-room and facility (DSC-Core) entries with a frozen sensor snapshot. Grow log is the operational event stream. |
| Reminder | A cadence anchored to the journal (water every 3 days = 3 days since the last water entry). Logging the entry stands it down. |
| Seat | Internal name for an inventory slot (hub, control, pot1, heater…). You will only see it under Settings › Devices. |
| In service | Whether the brain expects a device to report. Out of service stays grey on purpose and never alarms. |
| Role / task (Zigbee, Tuya) | Temperature/humidity sensors are placed: Zone, then Placement (canopy, floor, fan intake …), then an optional Position; the brain stores that as a role such as canopy_4x8. Other devices pick a role directly (leak_floor_room, smoke_room, plug_pump). A task says what happens on a reading (put the tank appliance out of service, raise a flood banner, follow the photoperiod, the Safety cut-off). |
| OOS | Out of service. Applied to appliances by tasks or by you. |
| Canary | Flashing one probe first during a fleet firmware rollout, then the rest, hub last. |
| Surface | The brain and dashboard version, three parts (for example 9.8.9). Distinct from the four-part firmware stamp (for example 8.5.0.0). |
| Hold after reconnect / pending re-assert | After the hub reconnects during a takeover, the brain holds off for the hold timeout (15 minutes by default). Once it ends while the takeover is still on, Settings › System › Failover shows a PENDING RE-ASSERT chip and Want will not re-assert until the takeover clears. |
| Demo mode | A fully simulated kit: no hardware, no LAN writes. The public demo runs it; a banner says so. |
| Lens | A curated Twin view: which layers, camera, look and labels are on. Picked on the Twin desk or opened by a link with ?lens=: Kit, Climate, Air, Light, Root, Power, Plants, Alerts. |
| Safety cut-off | An opt-in task on a bound smoke, gas or CO alarm. When the alarm trips, the heater and heat mat go out of service and the lamp plugs are switched off and held off until you release it (Settings › Devices › Zigbee). Fans, the humidifier, the dehumidifier and hub-dimmed lamps are left alone. |
DSC-Brain user guide · Glossary · this page is edited on the site; the Notion original was retired after the mirror