R.J. Steinert

In 50 characters or less...	Posted by	Post date	Last comment	Number of Comments
Say Hi	R.J. Steinert	Wednesday, May 23, 2012 - 7:49pm	Friday, June 8, 2012 - 10:59am	13
Hardware Licensing	R.J. Steinert	Friday, March 2, 2012 - 2:17pm	Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - 12:12am	9
Do we want a Tool approval process?	R.J. Steinert	Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - 11:04am	Wednesday, January 30, 2013 - 3:43am	7
Sending WiFi to the other side of the farm for under $200, Part 1	R.J. Steinert	Sunday, June 29, 2014 - 3:03pm	Sunday, March 22, 2015 - 12:34pm	5
Use pound signs instead of font tags for section dividing	R.J. Steinert	Tuesday, April 17, 2012 - 6:26pm	Tuesday, April 17, 2012 - 9:45pm	5
Program your Fido by sending it text messages	R.J. Steinert	Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - 7:27pm	Thursday, March 29, 2012 - 10:13pm	5
Ideas on how to improve the layout of the Tool pages	R.J. Steinert	Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - 12:49pm	Sunday, March 4, 2012 - 9:19pm	4
Fido Build Session at Hearty Roots Farm	R.J. Steinert	Tuesday, April 17, 2012 - 4:47pm	Saturday, April 21, 2012 - 4:19pm	4
Ideas on how to monitor multiple locations	R.J. Steinert	Sunday, March 25, 2012 - 1:16pm	Monday, September 3, 2012 - 10:52pm	4
Ideas for School Garden Curriculum in Ghana?	R.J. Steinert	Wednesday, January 2, 2013 - 1:30pm	Friday, January 4, 2013 - 4:39pm	4

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Fri, 07/06/2018 - 10:09am

Feel free to comment to ask me questions :-)

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Fri, 07/06/2018 - 10:08am

Feel free to comment to ask me questions!

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Thu, 05/03/2018 - 8:44am

Hi case495maine -

The Open Pipe Kit website lives at https://openpipekit.github.io

The .org address was just a shortcut to the website that we decided not to bother paying for. Sorry about the confusion.

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Mon, 01/08/2018 - 5:59pm

@sam_uk - I help out with maintaining Fido http://farmhack.org/tools/fido-temperature-alarm-sends-text-messages

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Thu, 01/21/2016 - 7:09pm

I cross-posted to this forum post in a comment on that article.

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Mon, 12/28/2015 - 10:34am

Hi Sarah,

I've worked on the Fido, the greenhouse alert system that sits in a greenhouse and sends a text message or email when the temperature is out of bounds. I've considered Thermodo for the Fido design but didn't go with it because interfacing Thermodo with a Raspberry Pi took an extra board that blew up the cost higher than going with a USB thermometer. With Android phones falling in price I think there is potential there that an Android phone could end up replacing the Raspberry Pi, in which case a Thermistor with a 3.5mm Audio connector would be a good fit for the design.

- RJ

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Thu, 11/12/2015 - 7:49pm

<p> So many options...</p>

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Thu, 11/12/2015 - 12:17am

Some more inspiration over at Grove Labs -> https://grovelabs.io/

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Thu, 11/12/2015 - 12:02am

Hi acko,

I've been evaluating the designs for hydroponics on the http://www.spacebuckets.com/ site. "Space Buckets" sounds kind of crazy but there is a lot of very modular/portable/efficient/space-effective designs being iterated there. On the topic of controlling water flow, "solenoid valve" is the keyword. Different valves run on different voltages which would require different "relays" that run a matching voltage. Lots of wiring required there. But I must say, I crave a plug and play solenoid valve. Ever heard of Universal Serial Bus (USB)? Solenoid manufacturers haven't ;-). There might be a market there.

- RJ

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Mon, 09/28/2015 - 11:57am

Hi possumhillfarm, If you didn't hear back from wisonsingarlicfarm, you can try contacting them directly on their contact form here -> http://farmhack.org/users/wisconsingarlicfarm

Cheers,

\ RJ

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Sat, 06/20/2015 - 1:03pm

Hi ormr, Thanks for the catch on the link. I fixed that in the code and it will be going live with our code release this week.

\ RJ

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Thu, 05/07/2015 - 9:15pm

Hi Joel, I have a link ready to go on the front page for the movie. Currently having some DNS issues so I'll have to push it later. Where to put the activity stream is a big question for us right now.

We currently have the old home page here -> http://farmhack.org/home/

And an early version of the activity stream here -> http://farmhack.org/activity/

It might make sense to have it as it's own page but maybe somewhere else as well. The trick is if it has its own page, where to put the link.

\ RJ

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Tue, 04/28/2015 - 11:19am

If you happen to have a printer already it will run you probably about $1 in material. These kinds of things make most sense when there is a critical mass of useful things to print so much that it makes sense for a farmer to buy a 3D printer. At the moment there is not terribly a whole lot on thingiverse tagged for farmers. I'm hoping this continues to evolve swiftly!

Things tagged for farming on thingiverse -> http://www.thingiverse.com/tag:farming

\ RJ

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Thu, 04/02/2015 - 5:49pm

Aha! Alasdair Allan to the rescue! I had heard rumbling about this "cheap WiFi chip" for some time but brushed it off because people were not explaining it for what it really is. It's an Arduino IDE programmable micro-controller with built-in WiFi! Alasdair points out a quote from Brian Jepson...

This is inexpensive enough to be very much in the territory of ‘thousands of sensors-launched-out-of-a-cannon’-cheap.

If it was just a WiFi chip for $7, that's no terrific feat, there are plenty of those out there, and their range and reliability suck big time. On a side note, if you are looking for affordable WiFi capabilities but high reliability and good range, check out TL-WN722N. We use them for Fido and they beat out over a dozen other products we tested.

Thanks for posting that TheHeadlessSourceMan!

\ RJ

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Sun, 03/22/2015 - 10:57am

Hi all - As a start, I changed the naming of the document from the GNU Farm Manifesto to the Free Farm Manifesto. While GNU Farm Manifesto is nice because it in a way gives attribution in the title, the "Not Unix" thing doesn't necessarily mean much to farms. The important part here is freedom. Thoughts?

I also rewrote most of the document to focus on four freedoms I've layed out that are based on, but not exactly, the Four Freedoms as defined by the Free Software Foundation. I rant on the right to know how a tool works in the context of software, we could use many other examples there for both software and hardware. I'm also thinking about a third section that might include some clarifications of things like the difference between Open Source and Free Software and how this Manifesto fits in. I do mention in the explanation of the four freedoms both the importance of freedom (free software) and competitive advantage (open source) but there is still much more to write!

\ R.J. Steinert

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Fri, 03/20/2015 - 12:54pm

Hi Devin, I address this issue in my topic here, but have yet to come to a conclusion -> http://farmhack.org/forums/brainstorming-gnu-farm-manifesto

Looking forward to talking about this more. Are you going to be at the Libre Planet conference this weekend?

\ RJ

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Sun, 01/11/2015 - 7:46pm

Hi packplantpath, We also found the supply of the Temper1 USB sensor to be lacking. We started developing the software to support the DHT11 sensor that attaches to the GrovePi. It's all pretty experimental at this point but we could get you a download of the Raspberry Pi software to make it work if you are interested. The Android version was just an idea but not one we've had time to implement. There is the Thermodo sensor, which given the right app, could serve your use case pretty well. Here's a list of some apps that work with Thermodo. Hub could be a candidate but I think it's only for iOS. There is an SDK, so, given enough pizza and soda a developer like me could make an app that does notifications from Android.

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Fri, 01/09/2015 - 12:01pm

Hi all - Sorry I missed the organizers call. I was sick in bed. I hope y'all had a great holiday and I'm looking forward to catching up next Thursday!

\ RJ

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Fri, 01/09/2015 - 11:36am

The uniquenes of farmhack is the possibility of community of sharing ínformation and also the possible sale of products: but not the sale of information. The growth of farmhack depends on the availability of free infomation, as a repository.

I agree with this. @adolfo Can you point out where you found these links that required payment?

A cool project for Farm Hack would be to do nightly migrations from the Wiki to a Git repository on GitHub so that anyone could download the total sum knowledge of the community for free. The key being that the migration would transform the Wiki into a usable offline format like plain HTML or Markdown documents.

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Sun, 12/14/2014 - 10:09pm

Hi Trenton, The comments seem to be tripping up the Markdown parser in Drupal. I'll look into that. In the meantime you could post the code as "Gist" on Github and link to that Gist. Are you familiar with Gist? I'd be happy to show you around it on a screenshare.

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Mon, 11/10/2014 - 9:01pm

Hi Broadturn - That's a great question, we're not exactly sure how cold it can get before Fido starts having troubles. Would you like to help test that this winter?

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Wed, 09/10/2014 - 8:28pm

Thanks for posting this Dan!

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Sun, 09/07/2014 - 7:12pm

Hi Joel, I noticed that as well. I just deleted some spam that may have been causing the issue. I'll keep an eye out for this popping up again.

\ RJ

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Wed, 08/06/2014 - 1:20pm

Hi all - check out the insert button when you upload an image to a Conversation or Wiki. It will insert into the body of the post the HTML markup for the image. Doesn't work on comments yet...

\ RJ

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Wed, 08/06/2014 - 11:42am

*Disclaimer: I work on Open Source projects similar to Edyn.

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Wed, 08/06/2014 - 12:59am

Edyn topic link

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Wed, 08/06/2014 - 12:57am

Edyn looks like an impressive product. I would love to see the knowledge being gained from farms around the world being shared with the open source commons. It's scary to think what would happen if we all depended on Edyn and then they disappeared.

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Wed, 08/06/2014 - 12:56am

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Sun, 07/20/2014 - 10:46pm

Hi Matthew, Here's a couple of questions to help narrow it down.

How many greenhouses?
Do the greenhouses have power?
Are they within a mile from a place you have an Internet connection?
What kind of data are you looking to record? ex. temperature, soil moisture, humidity, luminosity, etc.
How often do you want to review this data?
Are you looking for something that alerts you via text message or email when something is sensed outside of parameters you set?

\ R.J. Steinert

Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Tue, 07/08/2014 - 12:26pm

Hi John - I've been working on the Fido project that focuses on sensing temperature and sending text messages when a temperature is detected that is outside the bounds a farmer sets. I'm interested in the need to have more than one temperature sensor and also data logging. We're thinking about adding that to the Fido design but I'm wondering more what certain people use the historic data of multiple temperature sensors for. It may sound like a stupid question and I can guess what you folks might want that data for but I'm interested in hearing it from the folks who need it. Would you mind describing for me what you plan on doing with that data? Your help is much appreciated. Thanks!

\ R.J. Steinert

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