So as outlined in part I of my journey and after a quick delivery of ordered parts i had to solve the question how do i connect all these parts. I still found that i had a few meters of electrical outdoor cable (suitable for being digged to the ground) and started to think where to mount the 47cm x 34,5cm solar panel.

Option 1 would have been to mount it on the roof of the greenhouse – but then the sun would be blocked out at this part of the greenhouse – and therefor potentially the advantage of this hard gained plant growing space. So it would be better to put it next to the house where it would be out of the way and would get enough sunlight…

Hmm – thanks to me dad we had a solution – there was a left over pole from a clothes line – about 2m high and not beeing used for anything at all. The ideal candidad for putting the solar panel on top, next to and behind the greenhouse – my dad solved the mounting by using some metal and a self made wooden holder to mount the pole to the fence.

The wire i attached to the solarpanel not in the ideal way – i could not get the solar connectors (MC-4 or something) but i did not want to order those and wait again another week. So i just soldered them to the solar panel (and left room for improvement), drilled a hole in one of the acrylic glas panels of the house at the backside, put the cable through and sealed the hole with some silicon paste (which was a leftover of the greenhouse building action – another story for another day…) to keep out water and cold air. I quickly measurement with a voltage meter (measure points were the blank unmantled wires) and the voltmeter showed 20.4V at full sunlight – so this part worked out well and as expected…

Also in professional live the outdoor cable would have to be digged in up to 80cm below surface – to avoid it getting damaged by temperatures below 0. But as i had just finished the greenhouse and closed all the wholes i could not be asked to dig an 80 cm deep channel and pass through the (concret) foundations of the greenhouse just to get the cable in – so as i only had to cover 50cm’s of outdoor way to the hole in the greenhouse acrylic panel i decided to put it just there and cover it with a piece of cable channel later (professional electricians will kill me i guess – another area of improvement which i know about…).

Now i had to solve the part on where to put the charger, battery, 12vtoUSB converter and the raspi (which would need some additional interfacing to the GPIO’s, sensors, fans, etc. later on) – so i needed space for extension…

As i usually only spend time on the weekend and this one came already

to an end (there are some other things to do as well) this had to be

taken care of next week