Hey everyone!
I've been thinking about getting some Fidos produced to help bring down the costs and expand functionality. I'm going to be exploring the design & production options this month and will be going forth with manufacturing when/if I find a way to fund it!
With a $99 annual fee, it could be spendier than the cell-phone method, but seems to be far more robust and will work on farms outside of good cell phone coverage. You can't program it remotely, as it only talks one way, so I would think of this as a separate branch of the project. Regardless could still be super valuable.
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/11088
As far as the level shifter goes, I have an idea for a simple little hack that looks easier+ cheaper than adding one...
I've been playing with quite a few different temperature sensors over the past few months and I just thought I'd post some kind of summary about it. I may turn this into a wiki entry once I've gotten some feedback, improvements.
#Temperature Sensors Like most sensors, you can break temperature sensors into two different categories: analog and digital.
What do you think would be realistic timing for the base unit to be ready to start testing new monitoring modules? I had a conversation a fellow farm hacker today- there is land that we are considering grazing, but it is a bit far for either of us to monitor as closely as we would like, but not too far if we knew to check on any alerts. The primary two concerns are electric fence voltage/continuity and water level in the watering tank. I think we could use an off the shelf fence monitor and wire into the LED indicator light for an on/off signal.
Starting with zero Arduino experience just a month ago and many forum searches and mis-soldered connection I have made this progress: the DS18B20 temperature sensor up and running using the OneWire library. (http://www.milesburton.com/?title=Dallas_Temperature_Control_Library). I had some connection problem but that is all worked out now and I get reliable temperature readings. (I realized after I purchased this sensor that I could have got the cheaper and much simpler analog sensor) data logger shield build and working.
On Sunday April 15, 2012 Loius Thiery and I travelled to the Hudson Valley to observe Benjamin Shute build a Fido for a greenhouse on his farm, Hearty Roots. Our end goal is to create a device design and documentation accessible enough for farmers to build Fido themselves. We all knew beforehand that we had not reached our goal yet but we saw value in a trial run to see what we might learn to help direct our design and documentation efforts. During the build we took feedback and photographed Ben's progress.
Just thought I'd give you guys a little update on my progress since we're coming up on the field testing the weekend after this! The following discussion may not be of interest to everyone, but for the curious, here it goes (for the hurried, see end of post). Last week I was working on two different Arduino sketches that would be the brain of Fido - one was the loop that would take measurements, log data, and send updates and one was the one that would manage text messages. When they were both working great I merged the two programs only to realize that I was out of program memory!
Would you be interested some remote collaboration on the Greenhouse Monitoring project? I have a small urban farm near Cleveland, OH: http://baybranchfarm.com with a small hoophouse.
I would be willing to purchase the components and build my own monitoring device. And then also assist with the design and programming. Once operational I could give farmer feedback on the use of the device.
I figured the picture of the Arduino was not very descriptive of what we're building so took a few images from The Noun Project and whipped together this concept logo. Attached is the source file in GIMP format (open source image editor).