R.J. Steinert

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History

Member for
12 years 2 months

Contributions

Stream of Forum Topics

In 50 characters or less... Posted by Post date Last comment Number of Comments # of Comments new to you
Farm Hack Web Committee documents organized R.J. Steinert Thursday, February 27, 2014 - 8:30pm Monday, December 29, 2014 - 10:16am 1
Checkout the video of the new Raspberry Pi based Fido. It's a plug and play temperature alarm that sends text messages! R.J. Steinert Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 9:45am Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - 7:59am 1
Any input on a Fido logo? Here are some ideas. R.J. Steinert Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - 12:37am Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - 12:59am 2
Oooooh I get it now R.J. Steinert Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - 12:35am Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - 12:35am 0
Where can I find the source code for Cultivar's RainCloud? R.J. Steinert Friday, June 13, 2014 - 11:59am Friday, June 13, 2014 - 11:59am 0
Volunteering full-time for Farm Hack this summer, need your help getting started R.J. Steinert Friday, May 23, 2014 - 11:53am Friday, May 23, 2014 - 11:53am 0
Preparing 14 next generation Fidos for this weekend's iFARM event at Tuckaway Farm in Lee, NH R.J. Steinert Thursday, May 15, 2014 - 9:48pm Thursday, May 15, 2014 - 9:48pm 0
Any requests in regards to power and connectivity at the iFarm Event? R.J. Steinert Tuesday, May 13, 2014 - 4:59pm Tuesday, May 13, 2014 - 4:59pm 0
Thoughts on Problem Statement and Proposal Summary for Universal Adaptive Management Software R.J. Steinert Saturday, May 10, 2014 - 3:58pm Saturday, May 10, 2014 - 6:05pm 1
Open Source Seed Initiative launched today R.J. Steinert Thursday, April 17, 2014 - 12:50pm Thursday, April 17, 2014 - 12:50pm 0

Stream of Forum Comments

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@Louis Are you suggesting that the "Fido 2.0" design become a different project under another name or that there should be "Fido 1.0" and "Fido 2.0" Tool entries on FarmHack.net?

@Dorn I agree that there's some organizing that needs to be done on those tools. Currently we have the ability to create new Wiki pages and hyperlink to them. We should maybe try using that approach for now to figure out how we might program more tools on FarmHack.net to make that process somehow more useful/easier.

I organized the Fido tool a bit more today to try to make it easier for users to find what they are looking for.

\ RJ

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Hi jlbrian7 - Measuring electricity is definitely an important application. If the electricity is out and we detect it, it could provide an early warning before greenhouses overheat or refrigerators thaw. I've been looking at the Grove Electricity sensor + GrovePi to accomplish this. I checked out your hackaday project page. How would one hook it up to an electrical system to monitor electricity?

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I'm all for farmers choosing who they share their data with. I imagine the farmers participating in a data collection program like Monsanto's Climate Pro are worried that their data is going to be sold to the highest bidder and that highest bidder might not have their best interests in mind. After all it is Monsanto's legal obligation to maximize returns to their investors. Has anyone here read the Climate Pro "Terms Of Service" (TOS)?

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A while back I wrote up some ideas on a similar system. It was inspired by Abe Collin's presentation on Grow Clean Water. It's a lofty goal but something cool to aim for.

When we integrate ... - Project management, per field/facility, what particular people/objects need to do when with what equipment (includes automation schedules) - Budget management - Equipment inventory/management - Automated and manually entered environmental data

We can do ... - Smarter computer generated Nutrient Management suggestions - automated generation of reports for taxes and certifications - alerts when trouble is brewing

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Hi Jenna, Cool work you're doing there. Last year I had to calculate the size of a solar panel and battery required to support 30 tablets and a Raspberry Pi for 8 hours a day. Here's the calculations I came up with. It includes a couple of helpful links at the beginning for educating yourself on how to do the calculations yourself as well as some example technologies. Louis also helped out by verifying those calculations.

On the number of pins issue. I wonder if using a device like a Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone with USB capabilities would be a viable option. Plug in a USB hub and a couple of USB-to-Serial adapters and you could potentially have all the pins you ever need. I've never tried it myself so there might be some limitations there I haven't run into. The other option is more Bees/Arduinos talking to a central unit that is running the logic and sending commands back to the nodes. The Bee+Hive project Louis and I were working on has that potential but we have yet to build in sending automation commands from the Hive to the Bees.

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The videos are awesome over on the Robot Gardener website -> http://robotgardener.com/open-documentation/

Sam and Will, have you guys tried Hackpad? I like it a lot. You could combine your text documentation and videos into a Hackpad site dedicated to this project. It works like your own Google Docs site. We'll probably add support for embedding Hackpads on Farm Hack tools sometime in the future.

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I think that invention from the 20s is using a siphon to lift water. Siphons are used in grow beds. Check out this video from Bigelow Brook Farm where they hacked their Bell Siphon using a cup for better performance.

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Hi Benoit, Thanks for reaching out. Hearing others thoughts related to Farm Hack 2.0 is a big help. Our next step is to do a prototype but in order to do that I have to decide on an architecture that makes the most sense to all those helping out. There is a diverse set of skills of those involved (Drupal, Rails, Node) so I'm starting to consider prototyping an architecture that would allow us to use all of those skills. See the last item I added here on Path 2.

The goal you have for Manuel pratique de la culture maraichère is similar I think to the goal for the Encyclopedia of Practical Farm Knowledge. Check it out.

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Would a Fido make sense for your needs? The current design wont open the vent for you but it will text message you when to get up and open those vents manually.

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Welcome to the community Ruben. Since you are from a CS background, if you are interested in environmental monitoring check out the Fido project. I'm also helping to build the Apitronics Hive which we'll be posting documentation on any day now.

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@adiard.matthew It tooks me a little to figure out where your website is, here's the link -> http://go.farmbot.it/. It would be cool if you set up a Tool page on Farm Hack for that project. Link to your docs and forum to get folks involved. I just signed up on your forum, I'm looking forward to seeing how this project progresses.

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It sounds like Mike is the right guy to help push this forward, the interests align very well :-)

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@Bill The fix was on Sunday to give you a reference of when emails were probably ending up in people's spam folders. Let me know if you are suspicious of this happening again.

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Cool Pinterest board for farmers! I followed it. I think the link directly to the board is this one -> http://www.pinterest.com/joelbc/rural-methods-tools-equipment/

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Hi Bill, Unfortunately I don't have a recent copy of Excel for Windows. I do however have the Open Source version of Excel called Open Office. I just sent you my contact details using your the Contact tab on your Farm Hack profile.

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Hi Bill, This tool sounds cool, you must be an Excel wizard! I used to consider myself one, even now that I'm an experienced programmer, building a quick financial model in Excel is amazingly fast. Building these kinds of tools in Excel is cool because the "source code" is modifiable right in front of the user. That's also the scary part for folks who don't know Excel, it's easy to break it when someone places a value where a function used to live. The approach is a great fit for those comfortable with Excel and maybe that's what the tool should focus on for now. Excel is quick to program, Apps are a bit more rigid so having a nice Excel program nailed down could count as the prototype for an App where usability could be improved. Are you planning on sharing the document? I could make some suggestions if I had the document on hand.

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Hi Bill, It looks like the user Albert Rogers disabled their profile and when logged in users go to disabled profiles they are then forwarded to their own profile. For example, when I go to Albert Rogers' profile I am forwarded to my own profile. -RJ

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Good luck on the SBIR grant!

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It as nice meeting you at Maker Faire. Here's the link to your Kickstarter for folks who might be looking for it. It sounds like a cool project for controlling irrigation. We'd love to see some documentation for it on the Farm Hack Tools Wiki. For folks interested in monitoring weather data on their farm, check out the Apitronics Weather Buff package that will be available until October 5th on Kickstarter.

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Hi Adam, This sounds like a cool project you're working on. I see you posted some detail in the forum for this tool. You could also place the description on the Wiki page for this tool. In case you missed it on this tool's page, the button to edit is a pencil icon with small text that says "edit this wiki". I'm looking forward to hearing more about this project :-).

-RJ

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Hi Will, this sounds like a cool event and it's right near my parent's place in Waterford, VT! Yay! If you title the post like I titled this comment you might grab some more eye balls given that the event is coming right up.

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All else fails, here's the URL of the screenshot.

http://farmhack.net/sites/default/files/Screen%20Shot%202013-05-20%20at%2011.40.36%20AM_2.png

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See my proposal here.

P.S. @Louis I peed on your cucumber plant.

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See the attached screenshot to get an idea of what the design I'm proposing looks like :)

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I got that DOC file downloaded but I haven't had a chance to start converting it to Markdown yet. I do however now have a good example of how to structure documentation on Github! Check out the Video Book Manual on GitHub. I've been working on that for Open Learning Exchange here in Ghana and I just made it public! :)

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Is that $70 per unit as in you would have to buy 4 or 5 to relay them to your house?

One idea that is not exactly the intended purpose of Fido but... It would detect an unusual spike in temperature from a fire and send you a text message. Though, at the point it's detecting heat it's probably too late. It would be better to take the Fido design and repurpose it with an MQ2 Smoke Detector Shield. A text message might be too subtle of an alarm, I wonder what LOUD alarms there that play well with Arduino.

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No real documentation yet but I added the repo to Farm Hack's Git Hub account. It will be a while until that big file download (I'm on Ghana speed).

See it here->

https://github.com/FarmHack/Encyclopedia-Of-Practical-Farm-Knowledge

Or here ->

http://prose.io/#FarmHack/Encyclopedia-Of-Practical-Farm-Knowledge

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Hehe, those are some clever techniques. I hear that copying and pasting into "notepad.exe" is a handy way for Windows users to accomplish this. For plain text editors on Mac, I use Sublime2 for writing code and iAwriter for writing blog posts, both of which have syntax highlighting for Markdown format which is cool.

It looks like Archive.org has choked on that Doc format, there isn't the usual many-formats-to-choose-from :(. I'm downloading the big 500mb doc right now. I'm going to experiment with transferring it to plain text files with Markdown syntax which would work well on GitHub. Also, it will be a good chance to try out some of the other tools on GitHub for collaboration.

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Woohoo! I see their robot hasn't converted it into any other format yet. It may be because it's a huge file or it may be because it's in Word format. Let's give the robot a day or so to see if it can work its magic on that file.