Confucius
The garden really is in full flight at the moment, and we are drowning in peas, beans, potatoes, zucchini, rhubarb and heaps of herbs etc. About to come online are a million tomatoes and some really impressive looking corn plants. We are preserving and/or freezing a lot of produce for the winter, and of course the hens continue to pump out four eggs a day, many of which are used to lubricate the fledgling relationships with our local community (and the new girl Kelly loves an egg a day - and is now at 16 kg!!)
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| Panoramic view of the produce |
The quest to over-complicate gardening continues <heavy sigh from some quarters>, and we now have the means to monitor the temperature and humidity over about a 24 hour period.
You can follow this experiment online here.
Currently (ha ha) the monitoring time limitation is due to the power requirements of the ESP8266 Wifi module (so cheap to buy!) which sucks up a lot of juice when communicating with the outside world.
The circuit looks a little like this (but always being fiddled with in the spirit of continuous improvement)...
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| Mmmm...spaghetti! |
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Since these pics were taken/drawn, the power source has changed to a "homemade" 3.3V supply and currently (get it?) the supply is being regulated using a series (also another circuit joke!) of capacitors to smooth out supply and hopefully increase battery life. The Attiny85 sleeps for 20 minutes, then triggers the mosfet to supply power for the probe and wifi module for 8 seconds. A reading is made and transmitted, then the whole thing sleeps again.
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The prototype spends the odd night outside sitting under the stairs in the garden, providing hours of amusement for those concerned.
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| A lunchbox of electrickery hiding under the stairs |
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| Lovely! |
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