Biotic Instruments

Plant Light
Meter

Scan your room and see exactly where each plant will thrive — mapped from the real daylight through your windows. A true read on how a plant will do in your space, before you buy it. Free for iPhone.

Scan a room and map its daylight across the whole floor
See which plants will thrive in each specific spot
Forecast how the light shifts month by month
Every reading is real — foot-candles, PPFD and DLI from your camera

Download on the App Store How it works

Plant Light Meter room light map — modeled daylight across a room floor with a plant placed on a bright spot

Free

Price

Whole room

Daylight mapped

12 months

Seasonal forecast

Any iPhone

No LiDAR required

See your space,
not a guess.

Your whole room, mapped

Scan a space and see daylight modeled across the entire floor — through the room's real windows, at your real latitude. Not one reading in one spot, but the whole room at once.

The right plant for the spot

Drop a plant onto the map and see how it would do right where you'd put it — or check a plant you already own against any spot in the room.

Placed for the whole year

Light rises and falls with the seasons. The app forecasts month-by-month DLI for any spot, so you place a plant for how the light will be — not just how it is today.

Built on real measurement

Every spot is anchored to a real reading from your iPhone camera — foot-candles, PPFD, and DLI — so the map reflects your actual room, not a rule of thumb.

Works on any iPhone

LiDAR makes the scan faster on Pro models, but it isn't required — tap the floor corners in AR and any recent iPhone builds the same map.

Honest about its limits

The readings are estimates for comparing places, not laboratory measurements. The app says so plainly — a tool you can trust is worth more than a number that only looks precise.

Scan, and
know.

Scan your room

Walk your iPhone around the space, or tap the floor corners in AR on any recent model.

See the daylight map

The app models light across the whole floor, through your room's real windows.

Place your plants

Drop plants onto the map and see how each one would fare where you put it.

Point at any spot

Aim the camera anywhere for a live foot-candle, PPFD, and DLI reading.

Check a specific plant

See whether the plant you have in mind suits the light at that spot.

See the year

Switch to the seasonal view to place for how the light will be, not just how it is today.

Measured,
not guessed.

The map and the plant matches are only as good as the light behind them. A camera already measures light precisely — it has to, to expose a photo. The app reads that exposure metadata and converts it into foot-candles, PPFD, and DLI, calibrated per iPhone model against a reference meter.

These are estimates, built for comparing one spot to another and one month to the next — not lab-grade measurements. The app says so, and so do we: the value is in the comparison, and the comparison is reliable.

Sometimes the honest answer
is more light.

Sometimes the map shows a spot simply doesn't get enough light for the plant you want, and no placement fixes it. That's the problem Biotic Instruments builds hardware to solve. The Green Divider brings its own full-spectrum grow lighting, and our controllers add supplemental light wherever daylight runs short — so the plant you want can live where you want it.

Plant Light
Meter