Monday 23 October 2017

Shrinkage

"Why don't we pay more attention to little children and be nice to each other?"
Nurudeen Ushawu

Little things have become smaller - here's is the latest incarnation of the LED Strip project.

Proof of concept?
The old one (small) worked fine. The new one (tiny) also works. We're not sure why we needed the shrinkage but we do know the soldering is more challenging - so that's good? Also on the fiddling front is the creation of a very small RGB LED ball based on the attiny13 and an RGB LED strip based on the attiny85. Here are the prototypes humming away on our shelf at night.


We're working with Łukasz via the interwebs which is great and reminds us of our Amiga days swapping assembler code around the globe via the old 3.5" floppy disk - back to the future! Also the puppies had a heavy weekend of therapy with three kids - and are now sleeping soundly in recovery mode, as are we...

You know this is my bed...right?
The garden is amazing at the moment - we'll take a few pics and get them to you sometime over our long long 4 day weekend...



Tuesday 10 October 2017

Bowing to the rain

I love the rain. It's my favorite weather.
Kristen Wiig

Spring's four seasons in one day makes for great pictures - enjoy!

From the bedroom window
We have three fosterites coming in today for an overnight stay. We've had this mob before and they were great so here's to another nice 24 hours or so of madness!

In the meantime Mitch and Chels are on their Hanoi-moon in Vietnam (Mitchell's joke, not mine...honest...).  We'd show you a picture of the happy couple but Mitch is in one of his "filthy moustache" moods...so here's some scenery instead!

Nice rice




Saturday 7 October 2017

Roll me Dover in the clover

"The key to a wonderful life is to never stop wandering into wonder." 
Suzy Kassem

Okay so we were going on a "little trip" to Dover today - maybe about an hour away.  Well it was such a lovely day (as predicted by the air pressure rise in our en suite!) that we kept going - in fact we thought we'd find the end of the road. And we did at Cockle Creek!

Just keep driving, just keep driving, ...
We had packed a picnic lunch with coffee, cake, fruit and lots of confectionery - so it was a grand day out in the sunshine - delightful!  A two hour trip turned into a six hour trip - and what a great way to spend Saturday - well done Southern Tasmania...

Always a whole beach to ourselves in this part of the world
Point camera, get lovely image - easy!



Wednesday 4 October 2017

Bath House

It looks as though yields of over 10 times what we can currently grow per acre are feasible if you control the CO2 concentration, the humidity, the temperature, all the various factors that plants depend on to grow rapidly.
Ralph Merkle

Finally with some time (thanks holidays!), the Green House Project has bubbled to the surface again. Firstly we are planting peas and pumpkins in it's embracing warmth, but also it is appropriate to revisit the online monitoring with some new equipment that has arrived recently(-ish).

The old monitoring station used a crude time-stamp provided by literally turning on and off an ESP8266 using an Attiny85 as an alarm clock. The ESP8266 would power up and then log into the internet, hit a googlesheets page, and upload temp and humidity data gleaned from a DHT11.

There were some issues:
  1. The DHT11 was slow to stabilise (around 2-5 seconds)
  2. Sometimes the Attiny85 would shut down the ESP8266 before connection or data transfer!
  3. Power usage wasn't ideal, with two devices and a sensor gobbling up more power than we would like
  4. Some other nerdy stuff like the nightmare of reprogramming the ESP8266

Since then, a couple of BME280 devices have arrived, which don't need the long stabilisation time and can also measure atmospheric pressure (useful for the remote prediction of storms). Of course, they are more expensive, but not prohibitively so.

We've also grabbed the more easily programmable NodeMCU version of the ESP8266, which is just plug and program, rather than the confounding rat's nest of cables and separate power supplies previously needed for ongoing development. Also, we can now reprogram the device "over the air" OTA, which is way cool - look ma no wires.

Finally, we can put the device into deep sleep mode, which means no separate μC is needed to provide the wake up call, and therefore the device doesn't sleep until it has finished it's programmed functions (i.e. the data is transferred) which is highly efficient. We've also been toying with alternative power management, so hopefully there will be increased power efficiency.

Next on the list is to swap away from the ESP8266 altogether, and use the newer ESP32 (which some really nice features including bluetooth), a few of which have found themselves in southern Tasmania. But before learn run, learn walk.

So the fully experimental prototype of the new system is cranking out the air pressure, temperature and humidity from our en suite bathroom for your viewing pleasure. It looks like this...

Dodgy looking, but functional!
Stay tuned for more developments as the weeks unfold and the growing season swings into insane mode...


Tuesday 3 October 2017

Destination Nauru

Through the inevitable mismanagement of resources and goods at the disposal of the state, all forms of collectivism lead eventually to tyranny.
Friedrich August von Hayek

We remember the young citizens of Nauru being dispatched to all parts as boarders in educational institutions throughout Australia in the 1970s. The Nauruan economy was flourishing on the back of a resources boom in phosphate.  Cue financial mismanagement, poor vision and a lack of diversification and you now have a crappy economy where 90% are unemployed and of those who are employed, 95% work for the government.  It's so bad, they get paid to bear the burden of our sins.

From Wikipedia:
Because of mismanagement, the Trust's fixed and current assets were reduced considerably and may never fully recover. The failed investments included financing Leonardo the Musical in 1993. The Mercure Hotel in Sydney and Nauru House in Melbourne were sold in 2004 to finance debts and Air Nauru's only Boeing 737 was repossessed in December 2005.
Whilst Australia is way more robust, more diverse and therefore more immune from such sudden and catastrophic economic collapse - the warnings of what can happen when a resources boom is squandered are clear from Nauru.

Apart from noting recent incompetent political profligacy, we could also be more mindful of the dangers of Dutch Disease and the need for diverse and deep investment. We could perhaps avoid sacking a heap of scientists, and push money to the future rather than into making babies!

History is there to repeat, but why do our politicians crave (craven?) a repeat, and why are we so complicit in their ineptitude?  Bread and circuses anyone? From the quote above, does collectivism lead inevitably to mismanagement or can we the people intervene (assuming democracy isn't irrevocably busted)?

Meanwhile, after a good rant we need to till the soil, or supervise such noble pursuits...

Tending the garden at the start of growing season

The official garden renovation supervisor...