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.

Hub — the general term for 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. A Hub can be a ready-made GrowRig Hub (our product), a DIY Hub (HA Green, a Raspberry Pi 4+ with 2 GB+ RAM, or a spare PC flashed with the GrowRig image), or your own existing Home Assistant with the Grow Core add-on installed.

GrowRig Hub — the productized Hub: a purpose-built computer sold ready to run, with Home Assistant OS and Grow Core preinstalled. (Planned.)

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. Integrations also provide capabilities (ai.chat, weather.forecast, notification.send) that features bind to.

Cultivation

Grow — a cultivation run: a species, an optional cultivar, and a configurable stage sequence. An environment may nominate a control grow whose current stage supplies automation presets.

Stage — one step in a grow’s ordered sequence (e.g. seedling → vegetative → flowering), carrying defaults such as daily light hours.

Plant — a tracked unit in a grow, followed either individually or as a group (a tray or batch counted by quantity), with a placement history.

Species — a crop definition (YAML) declaring stages, cultivar attributes, care actions, and built-in feeding templates.

Cultivar — a user-defined strain or variety within a species, carrying that species’ declared attribute values.

Care — the grow’s manual-action journal (watering, feeding, inspecting, training, etc.). A care action is a session targeting one or more plants.

Feeding recipe — a nutrient schedule: products dosed across phases over weeks. Distinct from a climate Recipe (targets and phase transitions).

Inventory & integrations

Inventory category — a class of stored things (consumables, equipment, …) that declares the columns and units its items carry.

Product — a built-in template for a real-world item; picking one pre-fills and binds a new inventory item to the definition.

Inventory item — a stock record the grower owns, with one or more size variants, each with its own on-hand quantity.

Integration bundle — a reusable definition of an external service (its capabilities, config, and runtime).

Integration instance — a configured copy of a bundle, with encrypted secrets.

Integration binding — a mapping from a feature+capability to an instance, global or scoped to a grow or environment.

AI assistant — an optional, grow-scoped chat backed by an integration providing the ai.chat capability. Advisory only; it does not command equipment.

User / Admin — GrowRig is multi-user. Any signed-in user sees their permitted environments; an admin manages configuration, users, and integrations.