More with less

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Arthur C. Clarke

Lately we've received some "grow lights" from our good friends in 中国 which are 3 watt full spectrum lamps that we thought might be a candidate for an efficient joule thief circuit, recovering the last vestiges of energy from "spent" batteries. Pretty much all beginner electronics nerds try out a joule thief circuit at some stage as the lure of pulling energy out of a practically dead battery seems just like magic.

Of great novelty value, we've experimented with and made quite a few variants of the joule thief which has provided some torches and other night lights, but could this electronic oddity be utilised together with spent batteries to grow stuff? Inspired by a recent video from Julian Ilett we set about to make the ultimate grow chamber palace.

Enter the local dollar store and a small terrarium/fishtank with a few modifications and result is one freaky looking lunchbox.

Grow chamber or Nerd lunchbox?

Litres of hot glue and solder resulted in an unwieldy top chockers with the now familiar components of a joule thief circuit.

Symmetry is the key to eye-catching design

There is some circuitry "underneath" the board, including resistors and the actual lamps themselves.

They look like delicious little fried eggs, no?

Finally the hour cometh and with suitable musical accompaniment (35'19'') the little blighter actually worked, with the grow lamps faithfully illuminating as the sunlight was removed.

In the meantime outside the goats keep eating and the sunflowers keep drinking up the atomic energy provided FOC by the big yellow in the sky. Good one, and way better than burning stuff to stay moving. Alternative energy anyone?

Keeping the goats away from the tasty flowers

Which came first?

"Animals are reliable, many full of love, true in their affections, predictable in their actions, grateful and loyal. Difficult standards for people to live up to."

Alfred A. Montapert

We have been indulging various hens as they have gone broody in some sort of weird tag team game - a squadron of loonies pecking away at humans and generally being bad tempered and uncooperative. Finally though, after three weeks of persistent broodiness, one of our Barneys has come good with their 2nd generation. Kym thinks there are two babies, we've photographed one.

The evil eye from mum, and an adorable chick

Hopefully the local hawks will turn a blind eye for a few weeks, and also hopefully us newbie humans can provide all that is needed to ensure survival - we're certainly not going to do the 24/7 care we did last time, too stressful!

It's a lovely time of year for other reasons, we've been doing lots of socialising via BBQs and beach runs, and of course it's not a proper January without the obligatory sunflower pic - don't they just make you smile!

Giant sun-seeking monsters

Thank you to all the well wishers who have contacted us about Anthony's bung foot - he's off the crutches and hobbling about in a moon boot - for at least another four weeks the experts tell us.

That should be very interesting for both the start of the school year and also for Mitchell's formal graduation as an officer in the Army Reserve on Feb 3rd in Canberra.

Take care and once again, please lace up your boots!

Vegie explosion

"If you've ever grown zucchini, you know they all ripen the same day. You wait all of June and July for zucchini. August rolls around, and one day—bam! You have more zucchini than you know what to do with. You start handing them out to your neighbors and friends at work because there's no way any single person can handle all that zucchini. Not even if you're smart and resourceful and have accumulated dozens of good recipes, not even a person who likes zucchini as much as I do."

Grace Savage

The zucchini have arrived in force and are a testament to the growing power imbued by good quality local horse poo! God forbid if they decide to take over, we don't stand a chance.

The 50c piece is 31.5mm in diameter

The goats wander about now, but seem to return each night to their hotel in the front paddock - nice! That means the blackberry and other weeds are on notice - goat patrol!

Prelude to a "turf" war

"Detect and Serve"

"At one point it all went black, we could see fire closing in on all four sides. Our last option was to go down to the back dam, chuck the kids on a raft and chuck blankets over us and try and hope that the fire would jump us."

Daniele Marshall from Gippsland

Fire is an ever present danger here in the hills, surrounded as we are by bush.  It looks lovely but has a devastating hidden side. You may want to spend some time reading about the '67 fires here in Tasmania to get an idea of the horror that can be unleashed by the Australian bush. We narrowly missed the 2003 Canberra fires that took so many homes of our friends, colleagues and neighbours in Warramanga.

So we've been thinking about LoraWan and it's potential to alert people of impending catastrophe if a fire is started. It's already being used in the UK for flood alerts so there's proof of concept and precedent. There are extensive public and private LoraWan networks in Europe, but it's a bit sparse in this wide brown land.

To get our head around how it might work, we mocked up a more traditional wireless network prototype.  Shorter range, but it should give us coverage around the house.

Goodly nerd business

The mock up works fine - see the video below and skip to the four minute mark if you hate high quality gibberish and just want to see the flames.

We'll keep you posted on progress!

A meeting of great minds

"Meow" means "woof" in cat."

George Carlin

Wassup?

Goats, Ankles, LEDs, Clocks and Puppies

When a gust of wind hits a broken bone, you feel it.

Shia LaBeouf

Okay so here's some lessons to be learnt:

1. Make sure you fully lace up your boots when moving about on uneven ground
2. Caffeinate fully before moving about on uneven ground
3. Don't chase a goat, let the goat come to you with your bucket of pellets
4. Goats aren't worth a damn compared to full mobility
5. Even a human with the best of intentions and a strong will cannot win against a goat
6. Goats are stupid, but some humans stupider

Net result - one broken ankle, three missing goats.

A sheepish Goatherder 

So now Anthony is stumping about in a "moonboot" and many many "holiday" projects are on hold, giving more time for programming and watching movies - bonus?

One programming challenge is a "clock" consisting of 60 LEDs arranged in a circular fashion and a puny Attiny13a tasked to tick tock them - but how to control 60 LEDs with only 5 outputs from the microcontroller? Using a number of shift registers and many days of swearing programming.

One wire gets loose, one brain explodes

So far the test clock with only 16 seconds to a minute seems to work fine, and soon we'll add six more shift registers (8x8 to cover 60 LEDs), then tie it to a Real Time Clock and fire it up with the full 60 LEDs.  To distinguish minutes from hours, the minute LED is currently flashing off every three seconds.

And in the meantime, Smelly Kelly With The Big Fat Belly (SKWTBFB) or Kelly for short is still growing and will soon be a horse we think.

A Melbourne Cup prospect for 2019?

Take care and lace up your boots!

Summer fruit harvest and preserving

"A basket of ripe fruit is holier than any prayer book." 

Marty Rubin

Take some yummy fruit

Add sugar, lemon juice and heat

Bottle up the result

Experience summer throughout the whole year!