This phase in the project seems to be progressing slowly - probably because the activity I find myself involved in is very "non-electronic". I ended up riding across town to a distributor's warehouse and found myself a cylinder of CO2.
It's a refillable canister of CO2 used in a table-top soda making machine called "Mr. Butler's". Now I need to figure out how to safely control the release of the CO2 whenever required. Probably some welding and lathe work will be involved.
I also picked up an inexpensive roll of acrylic material - thin enough to see the full unit lighting up with the 6500 Kelvin florescent glow but thick enough to reflect a lot of that light back on to the plants inside. And a few strips of Sal wood to create a door frame.
Tomorrow is beginning to look like a day of intense cardio...
Something that's gnawing at the back of all my thoughts is the fact that I haven't come up with a design for level adjustment in this unit. The idea is to use the gyro to inform the user if the entire system is standing on a level surface or not. This is important because there are relatively shallow trays of nutrient solution placed inside the unit and keeping the system level and stable is a priority. The simplest solution that came to me was a set of 4 LEDs indicating the four corners of the unit. A blinking LED (or two) would indicate which corner(s) need(s) to be raised or lowered. I hope I can take some time off and finish this tomorrow. Really looking forward to seeing this feature come alive.
The absolute highlight of the day, however, was the sight of this beautiful screen :
After some three hours of frustrating build error messages
(actually it was this message repeating over and over again, no matter what I tried :
[mbed] Updating library "mbed" to rev #833480836776
fatal: reference is not a tree: 83348083677696a51d9b0250308e88815d77f10a
[mbed] ERROR: Unable to update "mbed" to rev #833480836776)
I finally managed to successfully compile the demo. The HYGROMAX farm turning up on the BLE Scanner app is probably the most beautiful thing I've seen in a long time. It is so hard to keep from staring at the screen every now and then... Thanks for the work on the BLE branch which made this possible, Maxim.
p.s. Quite frankly, I'm not very good at this build stuff, primarily since I've not paid much attention to it - so the errors I hit were probably just me doing something wrong or a simple error in the instructions online. Most of the setup on my laptop, as far the mbed platform goes, is mostly a result of watching videos on YouTube. But if this is an error that everyone else is also running into, the thing that worked for me is downloading the entire branch of the mbed os and copying it into the corrupted folder once the build fails halfway (after "mbed import" and "mbed compile"). Hope this helps... the joy of seeing the FTHR board turn up on the scanner is quite something else !
It's a refillable canister of CO2 used in a table-top soda making machine called "Mr. Butler's". Now I need to figure out how to safely control the release of the CO2 whenever required. Probably some welding and lathe work will be involved.
I also picked up an inexpensive roll of acrylic material - thin enough to see the full unit lighting up with the 6500 Kelvin florescent glow but thick enough to reflect a lot of that light back on to the plants inside. And a few strips of Sal wood to create a door frame.
Tomorrow is beginning to look like a day of intense cardio...
Something that's gnawing at the back of all my thoughts is the fact that I haven't come up with a design for level adjustment in this unit. The idea is to use the gyro to inform the user if the entire system is standing on a level surface or not. This is important because there are relatively shallow trays of nutrient solution placed inside the unit and keeping the system level and stable is a priority. The simplest solution that came to me was a set of 4 LEDs indicating the four corners of the unit. A blinking LED (or two) would indicate which corner(s) need(s) to be raised or lowered. I hope I can take some time off and finish this tomorrow. Really looking forward to seeing this feature come alive.
The absolute highlight of the day, however, was the sight of this beautiful screen :
After some three hours of frustrating build error messages
(actually it was this message repeating over and over again, no matter what I tried :
[mbed] Updating library "mbed" to rev #833480836776
fatal: reference is not a tree: 83348083677696a51d9b0250308e88815d77f10a
[mbed] ERROR: Unable to update "mbed" to rev #833480836776)
I finally managed to successfully compile the demo. The HYGROMAX farm turning up on the BLE Scanner app is probably the most beautiful thing I've seen in a long time. It is so hard to keep from staring at the screen every now and then... Thanks for the work on the BLE branch which made this possible, Maxim.
p.s. Quite frankly, I'm not very good at this build stuff, primarily since I've not paid much attention to it - so the errors I hit were probably just me doing something wrong or a simple error in the instructions online. Most of the setup on my laptop, as far the mbed platform goes, is mostly a result of watching videos on YouTube. But if this is an error that everyone else is also running into, the thing that worked for me is downloading the entire branch of the mbed os and copying it into the corrupted folder once the build fails halfway (after "mbed import" and "mbed compile"). Hope this helps... the joy of seeing the FTHR board turn up on the scanner is quite something else !
