• AcreLab Project Log 1 - The Beginning

    crradmall • 04/30/2015 at 16:31 • 0 comments

    What is the Acre Lab?

    So, what is the Acre Lab? It consists of two lab spaces, an external lab and internal lab. The external lab consists of approximately 0.9 acres and will house the garden, livestock, and other related items. See Figures 1 and 2 below.

    Fig 1: External lab space

    Fig 2: Internal lab space

    The internal lab space consists of a couple of 3D printers, soldering iron, etc.... The stuff that I will need for bringing the technological aspect to the Acre Lab. During the cold Utah winters, I will spend most of my free time in the internal lab space developing projects to deploy in the external lab that follow spring. Right now, that list of projects is quite long:

    • Chicken Coop
    • Rabbitery
    • Garden vitals monitoring system
    • Better composting system
    • Better irrigation system
    • 2015 Garden Plan
    • Growing my own plant starts

    So, as I go along with these projects I will update them here.

    The history behind the Acre Lab is that the ground has been within my family for generations. My grandfather and grandmother grew a garden on this land and another adjoining piece of land for decades. I hope to do the same on this portion. I want to leverage tools or create tools that were not available to them to increase the quality of crops and the ease of gardening. I also want to pass along the love of working the land to my own children.

    Monitor Node

    We have a working Monitor Node with a temperature sensor that reports to a Mother Node. My buddy Dicky did some really EXCELLENT working on getting these going and implementing some great functionality. It reports temperature right now. However, it will be expanded with more sensors in the near future. The solar powered Monitor Node is shown below.

    Monitor Node

    The Mother Node is wirelessly connected to the Monitor Nodes. The Mother Node then connects over wifi to my home network to upload the data to the internet.

    Mother node

    The data, temp and voltage levels, from the Monitor Nodes can be seen in the following pics. I have 2 nodes and Dicky has 2 nodes. See below for some sample temp and voltage plots that were generated.

    36 hour temp reading(*NOTE*the drop in Node 1 is moving from the inside our master bathroom to the garage)

    Voltage data (you can tell when the sun rises and the photo-voltaics are going)

    My Monitor Node 1 is deployed in the garage and Monitor Node 2 is in field measuring soil temps near the garlic and shallots.

    See below, for Monitor Node 2 getting ready for the outdoors with some AWESOME outdoor water resistant packaging....... a plastic Ziploc container. Yes, that is rice being used as a desiccant, sprinkled very liberally by the way.

    Monitor Node getting prepared for the outdoors

    A cover and some RTV and we are ready to go!

    Deployed taking soil temps 2" down near the edge of the planted garlic mulch.

    Another deployed pic

    Next steps, is to finish 3D printing the external packaging to ditch the awesome Ziploc plastic container. A preliminary go around ended like this. As you can tell it failed spectacularly. Hopefully, today I will have a portion of the external packaging complete.

    Failed external packaging 3D print