Project Logs

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• [T][P] Air ventilation

  kelvinA • 03/29/2023 at 13:21 • 0 comments

  So I finally got the new fan from the seller and it worked without issues. 

  However, I wasn't getting anywhere near the 29/33dB claimed on the label. On the lowest setting, it was 56dB from 3m away and 60dB from 1m and that was with the filter and air duct installed. I got 56dB on the last one before it broke and I thought it was that loud because the duct wasn't on. 

  I asked the seller about this and they don't know how the manufacturer is testing this either. I know that manufacturers stretch the truth (such as laser diode sellers saying that a 5.5W output power laser is "40W") but I'm an entire 20dB out. The seller was kind enough to send me a 1m acoustic ducting, which is just what I needed to get air from the window all the way to the tent.

  Now I've been getting some actual work done in here:

  The noise floor is 45dB without the fan and still 56dB in here, though the dominant frequency is a low white noise, with the inline fan sounding like a vacuum cleaner in another room. I haven't smelled any car fumes from the road outside the window, and the air is cold like its been air conditioned. Along with the views, it makes me feel like I'm in an (underground) datacentre (or a fridge).

  From feeling the air on the exhaust vent, I'm glad that I went with the 6 inch fan system. Speed 1 is probably the lowest I would've been okay with, and sometimes I enable the high speed to get more air going though. The actual noise output is almost the same, but the fan frequency is higher so it's more audiable.

  Right now, the TrueTent TempLab has become a not-so-temporary TempLab. I should've seen this comming, but honestly I'm so swamped with workload that my itenerary is essentially:

  1. Wake up and make breakfast
  2. Work for 24 block-minutes
  3. Eat
  4. [more of step 2 and 3]
  5. Sleep

  So I might as well save the 2 hours of transit time.

  [1 April]  It honestly feels like air conditioning in here, almost like I'm actually in a datacenter (I hear they're cold to keep the server thermals down). I've got just the background track for this: 

• [T] Fake window plan

  kelvinA • 03/26/2023 at 21:29 • 0 comments

  The plan I'm thinking of is to align all the panels in a line and hang them on the long left wall so that it's similar to the ceiling windows above. Then, I'll ideally use a microcontroller to vary the PWM signals sent to each of them so that I can simulate rolling clouds or something near the window moving in the wind, changing the light that enters the room.

• [P] Looking into the job-lot of LCDs

  kelvinA • 03/19/2023 at 23:14 • 0 comments

  I grabbed the first 8 screens in the job lot, put them in my backpack and ran over to the labs my university happens to have to see if I can actually get some artificial lighting while I wait for this inline fan RMA (it's almost been 3 weeks now... If I'd known, I'd've probably sent back the entire kit and reordered)

  I decided to focus on the dented one, since I'd rather use the one that looks the most damaged for my First Attempt In Learning.

  Hah! How convinient! Unlike some of the commentors, the panels have 2 backlight wires right here. Let's see the resistance. Wait... 2 mega-ohms?

  So then I was watching one or two teardown videos and thought "Just wrip off the band-aid and get it over with" and instead started seeing what I should dissassemble first. 

  That is... until I leaned a bit closer to the screen and saw this sticker:

  [insert truck reversing sound effect]

  I check my stash and all eight of them aren't LEDs either! So I ran back home and see exactly what's in here.

  You know those 8 panels I checked to make sure they were LED backlit? They're like THE ONLY ones. For a 12KG package, probably 11kg isn't even usable.

  I even had a feeling of "perhaps you should ask the seller to just send the 8 and not the rest, or perhaps a new job lot where all the LED screens are bundled together".

  Now I've got to figure out how to responsibly make most of the job lot not my responsibility (i.e. safe disposal or return-to-sender), which again might have been avoided / mitigated if I wasn't as hasty as I was. Shame that nothing has gone all that smoothly at all with any of the 3 main purchases.

  Moving on, I got back to the lab with those (slimy for some reason) screens and peeled off the tape on one to reveal the motherboard:

  
  

  Well the 40-pin header (on the other half of the board) was also ground, and I was just aimlessly poking pins until I noticed that there was a square with the letter A in it, and on an empty area of the board there was another fenced off area with "A" and a bunch of names, including LED_EN. It looks like that empty area is a map for the A area, which is too dense to put the markings there.

  In the near future I hope to solder some wire to test this LCD out and see if I need to get rid of all 25 screens.

• [P] Working in the Senua 2.4 x 1.2 x 2m tent

  kelvinA • 03/05/2023 at 21:09 • 0 comments

  [5th March 2023]

  If this tent doesn't work, the solution is probably a failure. Good news. I'm writing this log inside the tent.

  4th March (yesterday)

  Assemby

  So I received the tent and put it up for the first time yesterday. Interestingly enough, the carrying case is only for the tent fabric and all the other things are just inside a plastic bag or loose inside the box. A bit of a shame, but the folded tent does have a lower Z thickness than the Vivosun edition. I haven't been able to find a 4ft long box or duffle bag, and that's one of the reasons I picked this tent over the noname £108 tent.

  I was also liking the look of the white tubes already, and also like these black caps over the corners. The letters marked onto the tubes were also easier to see, since it was a white background and the font was bold and not a thin-looking Times New Roman as seen on the Vivosun.

  The instructions called for sliding the tent over the top instead of the bottom of the frame. "Interesting to see if that makes a difference in ease of assemby" is what I thought.

  Something I noticed was that the ceiling tubes looked quite bent on one side. I've sent an email to the seller and waiting on a response.

  There was also a connector that wasn't exactly round, so required a bit more force to fit the tube in.

  20 minutes later, the frame was made and it was time to unfold the fabric.

  After that last image, it turned into chaos and not like the Vivosun, which just neatly folded out once more. Well, I did eventually find the top cover and slide it over the frame, but the mass and lack of crumple resistance of this 600D stuff meant that there was some resistance. Same story with the bottom, but woughe it slid on a magnitude easier than the Vivosun one. There was no mystery fold in the corners, so that could be a potential reason, but I do think hooking the top fabric first before going into the bottom made things easier. Another thing was actually moving the frame as far away from the back wall as reasonably practicable, allowing more space for the fabric to get over any creases. 

  The zippers aren't heavy duty and massive like the Vivosun one, but they seem to get the job done (zipping the megadoor is the last thing to do to assemble the tent). 

  First use

  Now, the thing was that I was planning to use an old but large ring LED to light up the interior temporarily until I finally got around to the artificial light subproject. Unfortunately, it seems that the 15V@4A power supply has an issue because the ring strobe flickers at perhaps 10Hz. Thus, I attempted to use the small singular LED built into a power bank. 

  Then I moved my incomplete #Teti [gd0022] PC over, rolled out my lovely new flat ethernet cable and powered the system on. 

  [Tangent Start] 

  I put my PC to hibernate and, upon waking up, the Windows loading circle appeared fine but between that and the logon screen, the PC froze and blackness was displayed to the screen. It's an issue I've known about since the summer of 2022 and Me In The Past decided to just avoid the situation to avoid confronting the issue. 

  Well I Bing-ed... Bingified? for a bit, found nothing I could try, looked in Event Viewer for clues, went into the BIOS and saw a setting called "Fast Boot" set to Ultra Fast. I thought "Hmm. I was the one to that setting years ago. That sounds like something that looks like it would visibly do nothing but could actually cause issues. But it couldn't be that easy."

  Well I changed it to "Enabled". It worked. It was that easy.

  [Tangent End] 

  I still don't have a working inline fan, so I used a cheap but quiet normal fan. Unfortunately, it seems to be emitting a slgiht metallic odour. This tent fills up with whatever air is input extremely fast, so wether it's my exhaled breath or a particulate producing...

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• [R] 2nd Tent Discovery Round

  kelvinA • 03/01/2023 at 22:28 • 0 comments

  So I asked the seller of the £108 tent if they had a storage bag, and they said no. I asked the same to the £118 tent seller and they said yes. Additionally, this tent has extra vents that may prove useful (circled red). While this tent also has unnecessary doors, the borders are silver lined so they're not as easy to see as the black borders of the £108 tent.

  I found out that there is a pop-up grow tent, but it doesn't seem to address the fabric manipulation issue and, at 2.2m, is too tall to install. I don't have that large, white pocket dimension the people in the video below has.

  There are tents for bikes on AliExpress. The height isn't the greatest, usually coming in at 1.65m and this is a semi-circle, so the average height is much less. Most of them are 2 x 0.8m, but I have found a 2.1 x 1.5m one that looks quite nice inside:

  https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004113699077.html

  However, I think the dimension are actually for 1 segment and they're just showing that they're modular. I'd otherwise find it hard to believe that those 3 segments are 2.1m long.

  There is also a promising looking tent that is 2 x 1 x 1.9m tall and is more rectangular:

  Anyway, I've bought the Seuna tent. If that fails, I know a solution using grow tents does not exist and that any further research would be looking for something to use in April (because of AliExpress shipping times)  or some indefinite time afterwards.

  There's also a cool looking tent that unfortunately has no floor, is a 1.8m cube that likely wont fit and usually costs £200 shipping included (but the listing below has some outlier shipping price)

  This tent also has windows, which might be problematic or it might be possible to mount LCD backlight panels on the outside to give the illusion that the tent exists in the white pocket dimension.

• [P] Trying the Vivosun 2.4x1.2x2m Grow Tent

  kelvinA • 03/01/2023 at 21:06 • 0 comments

  I got this in the mail on Monday 27th Feb and was fully aware that, whatever happened, I was sending this tent back. I thought I'd try it anyway since I don't want to return a second tent from things I could've learned from this tent. 

  For starters, I was expecting to use the box as the storage medium (like a Christmas tree and the box it comes in), but I forgot that cardboard is usually standardised in terms of its strength, and it doesn't like carrying heavy things:

  Nothing inside was missing or bent though so I moved on to taking loads of images of everything I could so that I knew how to refold the tent back. This also means that I'm going with the £119 Seuna tent instead of the £109 tent (among other reasons I'll mentiin the next log).

  My hypothesis was that putting the metalwork together would be easy and manipulating the fabric would be the bottlneck for both assembling and dissassembling the tent.

  Assembly

   Not sure what that cutout of silver fabric is for, but I'm already not a fan of the branding. I did notice (over the couse of working with this tent) that my internal voice was repeating "Vivosun" loads because I was automatically reading text.

  Anyway I took everything out and took pictures of every step of the way, because I feel that the majority of growtent buyers are only concerned with putting the tent up and less so of taking it down again.

  There was also a second rectangle of reflective fabric. under the main tent (and liquid tray). The back of it is a greyish blue.

  Unfolding the tent

  Just in the event that somone wanted to know how to fold such a tent back up again. There have been many instances where I got something all nicely folded and had no idea how to get back to that state after I took it out of the packaging.

  After this is the main fold that turns this 1.2x2m looking thing into a 2.4x2m looking thing.

  Looking Around

  The zipper handles are quite large and made of metal:

  Moving on...

  From the sounds of youtubers, I was thinking that 600D was some substantially thick material, but it's 0.4mm thick.

  Putting the frame together

  There's essentially 3 types of tube. Long tube with push buttons on each side, short tube with push butons on each side and short tube with a hole on one side and a push button on the other. The short tubes are verticals and the long tubes are horizontals.

  The green tube is a brighter shade of green than the fabric highlight. I should also mention that the more I looked at this green, the more I thought "Wow. This is really green!". Just... green green. Not LED green, not grass green, not milky green (though that would look great) but some stock standard, Fisher Price, kid-grade green.

  My first idea was to start from the top and build downwards. Obviously that failed, so I quickly deconstructed...

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• [R][P] Artificial Lighting Discovery

  kelvinA • 03/01/2023 at 16:10 • 1 comment

  Ever since DIY Perks started projects on creating artificial daylight, I've always wanted to attempt it. The thing is that I didn't want to drill (more) holes into the ceiling or apply adhesive that could be difficult to remove if needed.

  I've mostly been interested in the laptop one since the panels are small and, likely without suprise if you read the explanation behind the #T^2 TyMist [gd0138] project, I find overcast sky lighting relaxing and improves my focus.

  Due to the hanging infrastructure in rgow tents, it means that I could mount the panels with ease. I also think it's a requirement to make the office feel more spacious / disconnected / time-invariant. Now that it's 2023, I also wanted to see if there were any new options that had been developed.

  The reason why LCDs are used is because they include plastic layers under the LCD array which causes light rays to be more collimated, resulting in light paths similar to that of an overcast sky. It turns out Alibaba now has 2 or 3 manufactuers of artificial skylights, but interestingly, none of them are on AliExpress.

  Since this Tent Office is the equivalent of a small room under the stairs or something, I imagine a long and narrow skylight would be fine. It's also smaller to store and probably cheaper than larger options. These lights can also do sunrise/set hues but none can actually change the angle of light.

  Unfortunately, it does seem that these skylights start at $300. Additionally, the light that comes through looks like it went though a skylight diffuser material and it doesn't seem to produce sharp shadows.

  Well, I did find one that looks good:

  At these prices, I'm somewhat dissapointed that they don't feature a PDLC film to also simulate clouds passing overhead. Imagine if there was an addressable grid over a large fake skylight that had low-resolution clouds passing though?

  Through this research I found out that photographers also look into ways to get fake daylight, but the solutions used are kind-of large and quite expensive (>£1000).

  What isn't expensive are high powered LEDs similar to the ones DIY perks used in his largest but most convincing LED daylight.

  I was thinking of some kind of motorised solution to get multiple light angles, but with prices like this, It's trivial to install maybe 3 - 5 LEDs and address them via a binary relay system (to guarrantee that only one fake sun is on at once). With this method, each LED only needs to have a single colour temperature whereby the LEDs on the ends have a warm colour temp (2500K) and the LEDs in the centre have a neutral temp (5600K).

  There's 2 LEDs in this diagram above and those rays are probably parallel enough to look convincing. I should be working not looking up at the fake sky anyway, so it's not like I need the fancy light scattering to replicate the actual sky. The idea is kinda large though when you bring in a parabolic mirror that is large enough to make sense:

  Maybe it's possible to use a 3D printed base and apply reflective tape over the top. A fresnel lens could offer a solution, but after taking focal lengths into account, is likely too large to store when the tent is down.

  Going back to the LED plan, there's actually some cheap job lots on ebay currently.

  Very helpfully, the actual screen models are listed such as the size and the model code.

  One listing was a bit of a mixed bag, but this listing has many identical screens such as the 13.3", the 10" and some 14" panels. This is ideal because then I can group these screens up to create a larger screen fixture. I'm also planning to address these LEDs so that I can have a low-budget version of Unbox Therapy's latest studio ceiling.

  (How convinient. He has a video on grow boxes when I'm talking about a grow tent office. Back to the ceiling, the first time I saw it, I thought they were addressable white LEDs but it seems...

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• [R][P] Carbon Filter Kit

  kelvinA • 02/28/2023 at 21:58 • 2 comments

  This was supposed to be written on the same day as Log1 but I didn't have the time. At least I can now also talk about the specific filtration system I ended up buying.

  Research into carbon filters in general

  So I started some research and it was suggested to get a carbon filter that had at least one full air chainge per minute. 

  2.4 x 1.2 x 2 = 5.76 m^3 => 203 ft^3

   There's loads of fan efficiency debuffs along the way though, so my aim was 350 CFM (cubic feet/minute)

  I thought that a human would require more ventilation than small plants, but it seems that the actual requirements are much lower:

  That area entered in is on overestimate too. 

  From my research, quite a few sources say that a carbon filter should be good for a year minimum. It is also straightforward to stretch this longevity to 2 years.

  I'm skeptical because I have a small air purifier that claims 6 months filter life, but the filters were spent within 4 weeks. However, I was researching the Nevermore when researching for the #SecSavr Suspense [gd0105] and these kinds of consumer air purifiers likely don't have enough activated carbon / charcoal to last very long. 

  Still though, spending (as I'd soon find out) £40 - £50 on a massive filter that lasted 6 months is still better than 1 small filter / month costing >£9 that likely only effectively filters for half the time. Also note that those 1 - 2 year expectations are with the filter running 24/7 and I wasn't running my small purifier 24/7.

  Researching purchaseable options

  The first filter I found was from Vivosun because I had just found thier £120 tent and wanted to see what else they had.

  These kinds of things really do look cool.

  I find this listing and am suprised that you get all this for only £53:

  The 6" wasn't in stock when I first saw this listing, but it was the next day for £65.

  There is also kits with smaller fans, but while they are quieter and use less power, I don't trust them to move enough air. Well, another way of putting it is that I trust them to move a dissapointing amount of air.

  Anyway, I eventually found and added the red-blade fan kit into my basket. The 300mm long filter was only £9 less and I thought that a longer filter would last longer and allow more airflow. Looking though the seller's store, I found the same listing but with a white-blade fan. The listings don't really talk about the fan in enough detail to pick on over the other, so I went with the white one because it looked better and a bit longer.

  The reason why I went for the £82 kit instead of the £65 kit is because I did some looking around on filter / fan prices and that £65 was a bit suspicious. The cheapest 150 x 500mm filter was £40 and the cheapest 6" fan (the red-blade one) was £41. I looked into the filters each kit seller sold as individual listings (because they probably don't stock filters specifically for a kit and a different filter for refils) and the £65 seller never mentioned anything about "Australian Mined RC412 activated carbon". I've seen that specific carbon mentioned on so many listings that I thought it was redundant or just an industry standard. Lastly, the £65 kit only did 150 x 300mm (which is acceptable for the price difference).

  I also found out about fan speed controllers:

  So if the 6" fan is too loud (which is my main concern over choosing a 5" fan), i could potentially use this to tone it down.

  Trying the system

  So it came in a massive box to the right (and the broken LCDs are in the box to the left, which I'll talk about in the next log)

  Here's the fan. Note how it says 33dB at 3m distance. I think the red-blade ...

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• [R] 2.4 x 1.2 x 2m Tent Discovery

  kelvinA • 02/25/2023 at 20:53 • 0 comments

  [23 - 25 Feb]

  So this is the first tent in my budget I found on 23 Feb, 23:00:

  This is a very cool but very expensive tent:

  This is a cheaper tent that looks more professional:

  Then I spent 2-3 hours researching about ventilation (which I'll talk about in a different log) and I didn't want my lack of finds to delay the tent itself from arriving. At 3am (24th Feb) when I bought this tent, I didn't detect any issues with the green tubes or branding everywhere. I was just thinking "Yeah green and light grey are my branding colours anyway." and "WOW! This reflective texture looks much higher quality than the first one I saw!". 

  Before I went to sleep, I saw the below image and I quite like the industrialist look of the overhead filter and bright interior walls, looking at this from an office setup perspective.

  So it was a new day and it took until maybe 6pm to realise I didn't mentally render the branding in any of my mental simulations. I look closer at the videos of the tent I can find to gather data, and soon I was thinking "Oh noh! There's "vivosun" every which way I'd look, and the green is the wrong shade." I can tolerate the green, but my worries have spiked because of all the interior branding.

  The reason why I realised I didn't render the branding or question the specific shade of green is because I found this tent:

  This Senua tent has the same lovely texture as the Vivosun, but absolutely no branding.

  There's an even cheaper tent that comes with rope rachets which are used to hang the carbon filter gear on the ceiling. Unfortunately, I looked into Gorilla Box tents and they also do the same branding thing that Vivosun does.

  It's now 9pm on the 24th of Feb and my vibe is at all-time lows because of the branding plastered inside a tent that's already been dispatched. The Vivosun tent was the only one where the seller actually offers to pay for return postage apparently, so perhaps I could see this as a risk-free venture? I did send an email to the seller and got a response at 8:30 saying that it's not cancellable but I could try and refuse the package. I've never done that before so I'm not sure how well that'll pan out.

  Because of this, I'm now being extra strict with the interior look of the tent. Thus, I decided to reject tents that have windows, since they'd always be closed and would just be some black rectangle in the wall:

  I found a listing that was kinda sketchy only because they took an image of another tent and poorly modified the image:

  This tent was £108 after a coupon, which is one of the lowest I've seen so far. Well that is untill I'm scrolling through the search results and see this detailed render listing:

  The tent is from Prodigy Tents, but in the process of finding that information, I found a 3D model of a similar tent. The tents seem to have more ceiling bars than most others.

  To end off the day, I saw this tent intended for office spaces:

  Now it's today, the 25th and I notice something missing in that £99.99 tent: the waterproof floor tray thing. Seems that option is out now. 

  Currently, I'm thinking of getting this £109 tent for the long-term:

  It looks like there's few things on the walls, such as extraction vents or rear mini doors (see the Vivosun tent) and the white beams blend in too, so I think this is a good solution with the Seuna one being a backup choice. The listing description also has everything I'm looking for in a tent:

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