‘tater time!

The other day I was cutting up some red potatoes for some dish I was cooking, and decided to save the end off of one of them, which happened to have a couple of nice eyes on it. I threw it in a flower pot full of potting soil and started watering it and a […]

Salad update

I’ve got the seedlings transplanted to the coco-coir filled net pots which are suspended in coffee cans full of homemade hydroponic solution. I need to get some real hydroponic fertilizer, but for now I’m using distilled water and some Dollar Store plant food, Epsom Salts, and calcium acetate that I made by dissolving eggshells in […]

Mr. Green Thumb, maybe?

So I said I was thinking about messing around with some hydroponics, and I totally wasn’t kidding. About a week ago I started some Lavewa spinach and some Mesclun lettuce, here’s how they are looking this morning: Hmm, could be time to water the spinach, it’s there on the left. A couple of days ago […]

Stalled…

Gah. Shipping from China is so hit or miss. I ordered some various Arduino parts from China, all around the same time. Some got here in a week, some got here in two. Some I still haven’t gotten, so my project is stalled. That’s ok, I’m thinking about messing around with some hydroponics in the […]

ATX Breakout Box

Working on these Arduino projects has left me wanting/needing a bench power supply, but I'm finding those things to be fairly pricey. Watching YouTube one day, I ran across a bunch of people that were hacking apart old ATX power supplies salvaged from discarded PCs, and breaking out the various voltages that are produced. “Brilliant!” […]

Cleanup on aisle 5…

Spent the morning cleaning up the code, changing all the “button” references to “sensor” for that eventual day when I get an actual sensor, and started fiddling about with the other three values that are going to show up on the display, namely system voltage, water temperature and oil pressure. It was in doing these […]

Learning to talk to the display

Figuring out how to talk to the display, and get the MPH to actually display where I want it to. This is try number three or four, and it’s starting to look good. I couldn’t push the button quite fast enough this time to get a two digit MPH, but I did figure out how […]

Solder time!

My cheap little display came without the headers attached, so it’s time to get soldering. My Grandpa would be so proud. And… It’s alive!!!

More goodies

Got a package from China in the mail yesterday. No sensors yet, just the second Arduino and more LEDs, switches and wires and such. Also included in this package was a 16 x 2 LCD display, so this weekend I get to figure out how to send text to it rather than to the serial […]