Terminology

Clear naming is part of the architecture.

GrowRig — the complete ecosystem.

Grow App — the user-facing interface. Implementations: Grow App Web and Grow App Mobile.

Grow Core — the backend and grow-domain control engine. It models environments, stores configuration, evaluates policies, coordinates devices, exposes APIs, and communicates with Home Assistant and native devices.

Grow Hub — the local computer running Home Assistant OS, Grow Core, the web interface, local storage, and optional MQTT/ESPHome services. The Hub is compute, not networking.

Grow Gateway — the network role providing private Grow Wi-Fi, routing, firewalling, isolation from the home LAN, and optional remote access. For now it may be any suitable router.

Grow Controller — a device that coordinates physical equipment and makes local decisions (for example, a four-channel PWM fan controller). It retains safe behavior when the Hub is unavailable.

Grow Node — a smaller device with a narrow role: a temperature node, leak node, remote fan node, or valve node.

Grow Panel — an optional local OLED / ePaper display.

Environment — a controlled physical space such as a grow box, tent, room, or propagation chamber.

Zone — a logical or physical subdivision of an environment.

Role — the purpose assigned to a device capability, such as exhaust fan, intake fan, circulation fan, main temperature sensor, humidifier, or irrigation pump.

Recipe — a versioned declarative description of target conditions and phase transitions.

Cycle — a running instance of a recipe or custom plan.

Policy — a versioned set of targets, limits, schedules, and fallback rules sent to a controller.

Hardware profile — a machine-readable description of a supported product or module.

Capability — a semantic feature exposed by a device, such as fan.speed, sensor.temperature, or switch.binary.