From

Location

Message

Date Posted

East Coast, USA

Big PatchLab Update — Here's What's New!

If you haven't logged in lately, you're in for a surprise. Here's a quick rundown of everything we've added:

Camera Feeds — Assign any IP camera to your grows and watch live snapshots inside PatchLab. Cameras open in a pop-out window with sensor data, alarms, and a built-in messenger. Save favorites to a new My Camera Feeds page.

Timelapse Video — PatchLab automatically captures a snapshot every 15 minutes and builds a timelapse of your entire season. Watch or download anytime. Sensors assigned to your grow appear as a live data overlay on the video. New frames keep adding without interrupting anything.

Public Grow Sharing — Set any grow to Public View to the World and share a link with anyone — no account needed. They'll see your logs, measurements, pollinations, sensor data, and photos in a read-only view. Perfect for sharing on social media or with family and friends.

Built-in Calendar — Create events for pollination dates, treatments, weigh-off days, and more. Get pop-down reminders on the day, one day before, or two days ahead. Export to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook with one click.

Sensor Alarms — Get notifications when any sensor reading leaves your set range, on the main site or in a camera pop-out. Monitors all your grows at once.

Community Garden — Home page now shows all public grows in a scrollable view with nicknames, watering methods, and live sensor readings on each card.

Grow Tracker — Nicknames show throughout the app. Multi-photo logs save correctly. Privacy now has three levels: Private, Registered Users Only, or Public to the World.

Messenger — Chat no longer jumps to the bottom on refresh. Send photos and files in chat. Draggable bubble on mobile. Notification sound on new messages.

Visit patchlab.app — free for all registered users!

4/29/2026 1:57:02 PM

Sunny Okanagan

Very impressive. I salute your dedication and persistence.

I'll confess that my only reservation about this app is its longevity. I understand that it's free for now, but at what point does maintenance necessitate some cost? IF the GPC was to implement a membership program, I would love to see something like this be adopted into the GPC, and then it would be up to them to manage it.

4/30/2026 2:36:45 AM

C N Y

(*_*) - eg

[Last edit: 04/30/26 4:31:11 AM]

4/30/2026 4:27:07 AM

East Coast, USA

Gardeneer-in-Training, Thank you for the kind words. You have some valid points with your reservations. I'm not worried much about NOT remaining free, because I designed the platform with maintenance fees in mind. It should be self supporting because even though the use of the app is free, the sensors that I have developed that work flawlessly with the app are not. So i expect the revenue from the sensors to pay for the app maintenance, server fees, hosting, etc. Honestly the Giant Veg Growing community is such a good community that I really don't think I would have any trouble getting donations for it or sponsors to pay for maintenance and hosting if that ever became an issue. I don't see it as an issue though. My intentions are for this app to always remain free to the community. I don't doubt though that the GPC has some things in motion because when I saw the auction site go live one night and played around in there, they definatley have a grasp on cutting edge technology. The biggest problem with the auction site was they had more people than they expected and not enough bandwidth. I'm always expecting to see great things from the group!

5/1/2026 8:56:09 AM

Sunny Okanagan

Thank you for the explanation. It is evident that a great deal of forethought has gone into this, and I am grateful for it. Despite taking two university level coding courses, I am quite terrible at it, but I nonetheless can appreciate the level of effort that has gone into producing your app. Thank you for your dedication, and for making the app free to all.

Would you be willing to explain the compatibility aspect of the sensors? Do you have a store/affiliate link?

5/2/2026 1:24:49 AM

Eugene,OR

Where can we find it?

5/2/2026 12:03:01 PM

East Coast, USA

The web app site is https://patchlab.app. I don't have the sensors listed anywhere yet. Just in the testing phase but almost ready to go into production. Would you like to test one?

5/2/2026 9:20:19 PM