I invite you to visit my new portfolio website. I'll be moving all of my completed projects to that site and eventually reworking this site to be a little more personal.

Phoenix is not the best place for kite flying. If we happen to get a breeze at all, it's often too light or too gusty to support kites. I've been trying to catch the perfect wind to fly my little dual line delta kite, but I keep missing the best hours of the day. I decided to build a little alert system that can help me recognize when the best conditions are present.

A few days ago I managed take note of the wind speed that I needed to launch. Somewhere around 14mph is the minimum for my kite, anything over 24mph is probably too harsh. I looked up those wind speeds on the closest private weather station to my apartment using wunderground.com. Turns out that Weather Underground also provides xml feeds for each of those stations.

Using C# I built a little application that downloads the latest weather xml and parses out the wind speed plus a few other details. I included options to set the wind's optimum and minimum velocities as well as the refresh rate. The current wind speed is compared to the velocity settings and scaled to a percentage value. 0% means you have no chance of getting off of the ground, 100% means the current wind matches or exceeds your optimum. Now I needed a way to show off the data.

A notification pop-up or ding on my computer would have been sufficient, but I wanted something more symbolic. I hooked up a small servo to a BS2 and added code to my program to output that percentage value over serial every time it refreshes. The basic stamp watches for an update and moves the servo according to the value. Mounted on the end of the servo is a wire with a little paper kite its end. As the the wind approaches the optimum speed the kite rises into the air. Pretty symbolic huh.

Now go fly a kite!

P.S. I'll let you know when and where the application and example microcontroller firmware is available for download just as soon as I work out some bugs.

I've been using a service called Dropbox for the last couple months to help keep the files on my netbook in sync with those on my desktop. I tend to do most of my work while I'm at home but it's always nice to be able to travel around with that data. Thumbdrives used to be the answer, but they're a little hard to keep track of and keyring versions get too bulky. Not to mention you have to think ahead about the files you might be needing. Dropbox uses a cross platform application to continuously synchronize files within a folder on each computer. Any file you place in that folder will be synchronized with any other system you use the service on. Plus there's a web interface for access on systems that don't have the app installed. It also keeps backups of versions and deleted files for up to 30days using the free account. Oh yeah, and you get 2GB of storage for free.

I'll be posting a full gallery of photos from the trip soon and expect to see some interesting extras.  I've been working hard over the past week to deal with the huge collection of GPS data I logged over the three weeks I was in the UK.  My AMOD AGL3080 GPS logger was running (nearly) every day of the trip and collected over 550MB of nema text logs.  At the moment I can't find a program capable of managing all of that GPS data successfully.  I'd like to extract some elevation profiles, walking mileage, speeds, etc.

While I continue searching for a tool to do that, I've been working on my own piece of software.  Using Jeffery Friedl's Geoencoding plugin for Lightroom, I tagged all of my images with the GPS coordinates of the location where they were captured.  Over 1900 images now have location information embedded in their metadata.  The next step was pretty obvious, drop all of those photos into Google Earth and view them on the globe.  There are a few paid software packages out there that can handle the generation of a Google Earth kml or kmz file, but none of them supported the kind of customization that I was looking for.  I laid out the plans for my own program and started working.  I'm nearly finished with the first version and so far it's working great.  There are a few bugs that need to be squashed, and maybe some improvements to the overall functionality of the program, but all-in-all I'm pretty proud of my work.  Expect to see my Google Earth kmz posted here in the next few days.

It's way to hard to post something every day because we're trying to fit so much in. I'm in Scotland now for the third day, in a city called Perth. Ireland was beautiful but it's tiny roads and truck traffic made it difficult to get around to all of the place we wanted to see. As a result of some back roads travel we stumbled upon Birr castle, home to the Leviathan of Parsonstown, a 72 inch reflecting telescope. The Great Telescope was the largest in the world from 1875 to 1917. Also an unexpected find was William Butler Yeats' 1919 tower home, Thoor Ballylee. On our way out to Aran Island the Irish Coast Guard decided to practice a helicopter rescue from our moving passenger ferry, it was quite a sight. It's time to try haggis and black pudding, have a look at some pictures and wish me luck.

It's actually day 3 of our trip, we spent Friday and most of Saturday flying out here and I didn't get a chance to post anything. Yesterday morning we arrived in Dublin and took a rather long nap at the Bewley Airport Hotel. After some rest we hopped on a bus to the town center and made our way into the Temple Bar area. Driving on the left side of the road appears a whole lot more challenging than I thought it would be, I'm glad the buses run just about everywhere. Today we explore the city and make our way over to Galway in the evening.

Last year, around this time, I decided I could use a bit of green in my life. I had contemplated building a small indoor pond, which didn't get far past the drawing board because of its size and complexity. I attempted to grow a few aquatic plants in my aquarium, which also failed due to some hungry fish damage. Growing plants outside and in pots is a bit difficult for a student that moves from apartment to apartment every year. I finally settled on building a hydroponic garden.

Hydroponic systems were the low maintenance, no mess, small space answer to growing plants that I was searching for all along. Best of all, I could build the entire thing in a few afternoons with very little cost. So far I've been very happy with the garden and I figured I should share the design with the rest of the world. I'm breaking this project into several posts, so be sure to check back over the next week or so for the whole story.


Let's start with an overview of the garden and the required parts.

Necessary Tools:

• rotary tool with side cutting bit and sander
• safety glasses
• razor blade
• pencil

Parts and Materials List:
 (I'm not promoting the purchase of these items from any particular business, links are provided for product information and convenience, do some shopping and find better deals!)

• 1 - 18 gallon plastic tote (various colors/sizes/shapes)
• 1 - 250GPH Submersible pump (higher flow rates also work)
• 1 - 1/2" hose barb to 1/2" male threaded connector
• 1- Hydroport 8 port drip manifold 
• 5 - Drip heads (experiment with different heads)
• 2.5ft - 1/2" OD vinyl tubing
• 8ft - 1/4" silicone tubing (you can find better colors)
• 5 - 5" diameter net pots
• 10 L - Hydrotron 8-16mm expanded clay
• 2 - 5500K, 27 Watt, n:vision CFL Bulbs
• 2 - 10 1/2" Clamp Lights
  
• 1 bag - Rockwool Starter Cubes (if you can find something in a smaller quantity, use that)
  
• 1 bottle - Flora Nova Grow
• 1 bottle - Flora Nova Bloom
• 1 - Timer System (I built a custom timer)
• 1 - Package of Seeds (pay attention to the growing conditions)
  

Wow that's a long list! Lets get started.


The lid of the tote is where all of the work needs to be done, so lets begin with that.  When you choose your tote, pick a size that lets you accommodate the size and number of net pots that you want to use.  The bigger the pot, the larger the plant you can accommodate.  I chose to use five 5" pots on a 18 gallon tote.  Whatever you use, be sure to space them far enough apart on the tote lid that enough plastic remains to support them.


Place the pots upside down on the tote lid and trace their outlines.  DO NOT cut on this line!  Draw another circle about 3/8" inside the outline of the pots, cut out this inner circle with your rotary tool and side cutting bit.  Test fit a pot and take a look at how far down it sits in the hole, some pots have a larger diameter rim on the top that should rest on the tote lid, otherwise leave about 3/4" of the pot above the lid.  Sand down the edges of the cuts for a clean, tight fitting finish.


Next, choose a spot on the lid for the watering manifold to sit.  I placed it behind my center pot.  Trace the 1/2" barb connector's threaded end on the lid and cut a hole just smaller than the outline.  Test fit the connector and slowly enlarge the hole with a sanding tool until the connector screws in tightly. Attach the manifold to the threaded end of the connector and the 1/2" tubing to the other.  Connect the other end of the tubing to the pump.


Assemble the garden by placing the pump in the tote, letting the cord run over the back.  Tie a loose knot in the pump cord where it touches the floor behind the garden, this will prevent water from running along the cord to an outlet in case of a leak.  Fill the pots with well rinsed expanded clay and place them in the lid.  Snap on the lid and admire.

Before you can start using the garden, you'll need a dependable timer to control the pump and lights.  Plants need a period of dark as well as light so you can't leave your lights on 24/7.  If you choose you can control the lights with a simple light timer found at Ikea or Wal-Mart.  The pump is a different beast, depending on the type of plants you are growing the pump will need to be on for a short length of time every half hour or so.  I haven't found a simple solution to this on store shelves and pump controllers for high end hydroponics are expensive for their simplicity.  I'll be going over my custom timer design in the upcoming posts.  Also stay tuned for light mounting options and accessories.