Sweet CLT

Cool evening tonight complete with sun-showers.  Even saw a rainbow over the BOA building.

Another Arduino Plant Watering System

Since my previous plant watering system was much too complex (using wifi, ftp, a hacked cell phone, and power line communication) I decided on a bit more low-level technique:  home built sensors and the Arduino platform.

In comparison this method is:

• Reliable.  If there is a power outage watering will begin again upon power return.
• Equipment is safer.  The water level must test positive before the pump is cycled on, preserving pump life.
• Intelligent.  Software modifiable instruction.
• Independent.  Isolated system is not affected by remote issues.
• Much cooler.

Everything is boxed in an exterior double gang receptacle container, which I deemed appropriate considering the 110v AC involved.  The expandable sensor assortment currently contains two (2) RCA jacks to connect to a low-water-level sensor as well as a moisture sensor (placed in the pot most likely to dry out).

Since there is no water supply on my balcony, a pump is cycled on at proscribed times to supply drip irrigation lines.

If the pump runs dry it will seize, so prior to usage a low-water-level sensor is polled.  If the test fails, it will not run.  The test will be reconsidered at the next scheduled watering time.

In my current configuration, it's difficult to over-water due to the building configuration and elevation.  The Arduino is set to water everyday for five (5) minutes.  In addition to that, two (2) more times a day it will test for dryness at the most susceptible pot.  If it's below the set threshold it will water more.

There is also an alarm pin that will provide an indication of low water level, should I not be paying attention.

I'll post more specifics later on.

EggFarmerFunny

I just got a laugh from the full page ad in the Wall Street Journal taken out by America's Egg Farmers - a message to the American people.  According to them, they cannot produce a product safe enough for "over-easy".

That's top quality for you.   Since more than 99% of our eggs are produced by large-scale jokers, that means the extintion of certain kinds of food we eat...

How safe is our food supply?

For people who live their lives blissfully unaware of where that burger came from - they probably have no idea.  Those few who strive to consume small batch local products are free to worry about their family and friends -- content in their relative safety.

The massively scaled U.S. food production and distribution system -- which generally favours 'food stability' over 'food taste' and actually anticipates fecal matter in its final product  -- could use some improvement.  It's surprising how little consumers care about it until people start dieing.

But its only 5,000 people who will die this year in the U.S. -- at least according to the CDC.  I guess that's more people than will be killed by terrorists from Afghanistan...  I'm sure that next week the same people will pick up the pack of 97¢ eggs.

It's cheaper to eat clean good food that you cook yourself than it is to eat fast cheap food -- even with unfair subsidies propping up the system.  Save a life -- teach someone to cook.

Dude, you still got a light out

$880 million dollars, and they can't fix the light that's been out for months?



View from 28203.

Watering My Plants FAIL

Well, they're still alive -- but the system failed.  Earlier I drew a diagram of my plan.

The X10 controller -- which I wasn't even using in it's X10-electrical-wire-transmit-glory because, probably, it sucks -- worked flawlessly for a week prior to me going on vacation.  I was using it in it's RF capacity, via the Firecracker attachment.  Windows scheduler ran a batch file to cycle the Firecracker.  I was pretty sure about this part.

I wanted to be able to supplement watering on hot days, or when my plants were visibly wilting.  My Touch Pro phone was setup on a tripod downstairs to ftp images every couple of seconds back to the webserver over wifi. Unfortunately, I knew I would have problems with this setup.  The phone would overheat in the sunshine and stop recharging the battery.  So I had to have it reboot itself a couple times a day to be safe.

I don't know how long it lasted, but on the second day I couldn't access the website.  It seems the Savant web server went down without asking me.

And I couldn't ftp in to check the pics, but I may have never opened up ftp to the outside...

But at least I could VNC on in and run the watering cycle.  At least for a couple days.  Apparently that failed too.  I thought the power went out...  Nope, UltraVNC went down.  And it never does that.

But the scheduler kept trickling along every day to supply just enough to keep them alive in the 100 degree heat.  At least until the day I returned.  It seems that the X10 receiver received the ON command, but not the OFF command.  I think it was trying to break my pump.

So I'm going to try an isolated arduino approach.  It should function as a basic fine-tuned timer with push button instant gratification and optional programming opportunities.

How to run Teenpup on a really old computer

So I wanted to run Teenpup2010mini on a 500MHz PIII with 192MBs of RAM and about 4GBs of storage on a second partition.  I wanted to use Amarok to manage and play FLACs over wifi from my music server.  Internet streams would be nice, too.

Lucid Puppy was my first choice, but I couldn't get Amarok to work with a "frugal" install.  Teenpup comes with Amarok pre-installed so I went with that.

I used the LuPu to mount and extract the Teenpup .sfs to its home on the second partition -- after converting it to the proper squash file format with the included utility.

I put the vmlinuz file in the first partition, since my grub can't access stuff on other partitions.  One Grub menu entry boots into a root on the second partition. [I'll have to copy the grub entry here...]

Thanks to the excellent Puppy developers and folks at murga-linux!  It works flawlessly, so far.  Now I have a dependable, lossless, wireless music manager & client for my stereo.