Irrigation rocks!

May25
by catz on May 25, 2020 at 17:48 and modified on May 28, 2020. at 12:47
Posted In: gardening, garlic

Over the weekend we installed out first irrigation system, the Irrigation Direct Canada “Drip Irrigation Watering Kit for Row Crops”.
We installed it in vegbed4, where the fall planted garlic crop resides.

A standard system of garden water hoses takes water to the vegbed. From there is:
a cutoff valve
a mechanical timer good for up to 120 minutes
a vaccuum breaker/backflow valve
a filter
a pressure reducer
an adapter to connect to the main line tubing.

From there were tried out two methods, one line down the centre of a garlic row, each row consisting of 6 cloves/plants and running approx 20-25′. We did this on two of the rows.

single line irrigation tape

The tape looks to be pretty heavy duty with a water drip emitter every 8″.
Because of this spacing we also tried out another method on three of the rows, that being two tape lines down each row.
If we find that the single tape lines do not deliver enough water, we can easily move the two singles into a double line and install a new double.

double line of irrigation tape per row

We have enough to run another system in vegbed5, where the tomatos will be transplanted into in a couple of weeks

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sandboxing in the greenhouse

May12
by catz on May 12, 2020 at 07:03 and modified on May 12, 2020. at 13:23
Posted In: gardening

Last fall we decided to do another greenhouse renovation. a few years before we insulated the north wall, so thought it would be a good time to insulate another wall, this time the south. At the same time, we have always struggled with keeping the seeds and plants in the greenhouse warm enough in the cold spring. A friend of ours at Bumblerock Farm had built a heated sandbed for their plants and we thought it was an excellent idea to try out as well. This was the old plant stand in the greenhouse, three shelves.


We pulled out the old shelves. Many years ago we insulated the floor and put in a newer subfloor. WHat with it being a greenhouse and all, yes there has been waterdamage to the floor, especially from some of the roof leaks we have had in the past.


We had extra pink insulation kicking around so used it to fill in the gaps, covered it in vapour barrier and then plywood.


Another segment of the wall insulated


Because the sandbed would be much heavier than the normal plant load, we had to build a reinforced shelf, this out of 2×6 lumber.


We added some insulation foil to help keep everything inside the walls of the bed.


And finally added sand. This was many bags of sand. We also wrap the shelving in plastic and add a ceramic heater inside to help keep the plants warm.

After that we added two more shelves and plastic over the top and front.
So far the inside temperature has been much more stable than anything we have tried in the past and we are quite happy with it.
We added an earth heating cable into the sane with a self regulating thermostat.

Hydrofarm Soil Heating Cable, 48-Feet $52Can
“Place in ground to speed germination and seedling growth with gentle heat
Perfect indoors or out, this cable is 48-Feet long, safely encased in a tough, waterproof PVC coating with orange color for visibility
Cover the cable with 3 to 4-Inches of soil, then plant your seeds, seedlings, or plants above this height
It is designed to last for many seasons, offering an economical and effective solution to the problem of cold weather slowing down your garden”

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Birds!

May11
by catz on May 11, 2020 at 11:50
Posted In: life the universe and everything


This is a Downey Woodpecker, one of at least a few that come by and try to destroy our sunflower seed feeders.
We were testing a very old pentax K mount 500mm f8 lens with a pentaxKtoCanon adapter and attached it to our oldCanon300D DSLR. Works pretty good. The depth of field is pretty small, almost nonexistant, but it does work well.

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Raised Veg Beds

May11
by catz on May 11, 2020 at 11:45
Posted In: gardening


And this is the latest design revision for our raised beds. This is VegBed2, first built in 2005 out of mini garden ties. Over time they were thought to be strong, long lived and cost effective. Over 15 years later, they were none of the above. In addition to being too shallow, they rotted out, split and were a pain.
So, the old walls were removed and new 2×8 layers were put in. This gives us 15″ of soil depth, more than before. We also capped the top with 2x4s to help it maintain its straightness during the winter frost heave, that tends to push out the centres. This new bed is 4’x24′ and it actually more square footage than the older version.
In addition, the top cap will allow us to build a plastic cold frame hoop in the future.
The parts list is eight 2″x8″x8′ and seven 2″x4″x8′, black weed cloth lining the inside.

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K vs Squirrel

May11
by catz on May 11, 2020 at 11:37 and modified on May 11, 2020. at 11:38
Posted In: life the universe and everything


The latest in the me vs squirrel battle. The squirrels refuse to believe the argument that a bird feeder is for birds and not Squirrels.
This is the latest rebuild of the bird feeder, with a lower clearance and wider roof, and a brand new design of squirrel baffle. So far it is 100% in blocking the black squirrels and the red squirrels. It is approx 24″x24″ of flexible thin tin.

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a sign of the times

May11
by catz on May 11, 2020 at 11:30
Posted In: life the universe and everything

A sign of the Covid19 times, the Colebrook playground is out of bounds.
We did a drive around the area, and actually there are very few indicators of anything out of sorts otherwise.

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2017 august 21 eclipse

Apr17
by catz on April 17, 2020 at 11:52
Posted In: astronomy, travel, weather

Just thinking back to the 2017 August 21st eclipse in Wyoming and could not find the air temperature data we took… so here it is, maybe again:

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two great startrails

Apr17
by catz on April 17, 2020 at 09:22 and modified on April 17, 2020. at 09:22
Posted In: astronomy

allsky1pi night of april 15/16

allsky1pi night of april 16/7

The allsky1pi camera system project is awesome. The last two nights have been relatively clear and the images it is generating are very nice!
These startrails are from the last two nights.

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two nice meteors

Apr12
by catz on April 12, 2020 at 13:34 and modified on April 12, 2020. at 14:23
Posted In: astronomy

Two nice meteors in the last two days:

North up, south down, west right, east left.

Saturday 2020 April 11, 04:13:07 UT = Saturday 2020 April 11, 00:13:07 EDT
This was a 4 second event: Video: https://starlightcascade.ca/allsky2/video/ev_20200411_041307A_10A.mp4

The new Allsky1Pi camera system also caught it:

And then another the same day but next night

North up, south down, west right, east left.
Sunday 2020 April 12 01:15:46 UT = Saturday 2020 April 11 21:15:46 EDT
This was a 9 second event: Video: https://starlightcascade.ca/allsky2/video/ev_20200412_011546A_10A.mp4

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Allsky1pi update

Apr08
by catz on April 8, 2020 at 09:07
Posted In: astronomy, tech

We are superduper happy with the allsky1pi camera project. It has better resolution and colour images over the older allsky1 system (2006-2018) running a very old SBIG ST237A camera system. It also required a desktop computer with parallel port for the camera controller box. Keeping a desktop running outdoors in the winter did have its challenges (numerous versions of blankets, wood boxes, multiple hard drive failures, etc). and not a small amount of electricity to run (80-100 watts 24h/365d)

(that’s approx 2.4kwh/day or 876 kwh/year at our average power price of $0.15 came out to about $130/year! (not counting the dome heating or the camera controller power). We run on time-of-use billing which gave us low rates for 12hr/day mon-fri and 24hr/day on weekends and holidays.

The new project runs on an ittybitty raspberry pi and comes in under 10w for the computer and camera combined. And that comes in at only $13/year all else being equal.

It has now been running for 31 days without intervention as well!

Love it!

pi@allsky1pi:~ $ uptime
08:54:02 up 31 days, 13:58, 3 users, load average: 0.01, 0.04, 0.05

pi@allsky1pi:~ $ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 948304 117396 307052 11040 523856 756232
Swap: 102396 84288 18108

pi@allsky1pi:~ $ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 7.0G 4.3G 2.4G 65% /
/dev/mmcblk0p1 253M 52M 201M 21% /boot

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Allskypi Camera System Project

Mar08
by catz on March 8, 2020 at 11:31 and modified on March 8, 2020. at 17:35
Posted In: astronomy, tech


The allskypi camera system is pretty much operational, subject to a few additional tweaks in the upcoming days. This is the first report giving background details:

allskypiCameraproject20200308v2

Many thanks to the original project creator: https://www.instructables.com/id/Wireless-All-Sky-Camera/

Future upgrades includes: dark frame image processing out hot pixels, a wider angle lens for more sky coverage, more text annotations onto the images, and possibly some active cooling of the housing to reduce the camera sensor temperature.

pi@allsky1pi:~/allsky $ cat settings.json
{
“width”:”0″,
“height”:”0″,
“exposure”:”90000″,
“maxexposure”:”90000″,
“autoexposure”:”1″,
“gain”:”50″,
“maxgain”:”200″,
“autogain”:”0″,
“gamma”:”50″,
“brightness”:”50″,
“wbr”:”53″,
“wbb”:”90″,
“bin”:”1″,
“delay”:”1000″,
“daytimeDelay”: “60000”,
“type”:”1″,
“quality”:”95″,
“usb”:”30″,
“filename”:”image.jpg”,
“flip”:”0″,
“text”:”text”,
“textx”:”15″,
“texty”:”30″,
“fontname”:”0″,
“fontcolor”:”255 255 255″,
“smallfontcolor”:”0 0 255″,
“fonttype”:”0″,
“fontsize”:”0.7″,
“fontline”:”1″,
“outlinefont”:”0″,
“latitude”:”44.4N”,
“longitude”:”76.77W”,
“angle”:”-6″,
“time”:”1″,
“darkframe”:”0″,
“showDetails”:”1″
}

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Allskypi camera sensor temp review

Mar04
by catz on March 4, 2020 at 09:36 and modified on March 4, 2020. at 11:12
Posted In: astronomy, tech


Allskypi is an allsky camera system with a ZWO ASI 120MC camera and wide angle lens protruding out into a 4″ transparent dome, with the remainder of the camera and the raspberry pi beneath it in the housing.

The dome was condensing and frosting, so we added a heater inside the dome.

Now the sensor temperatures are higher than we would like, but the condensing and frost problems seem to be fixed.


The holes in the lid were drilled pre-dome-heater, hoping to have hot air from inside the housing rise up into the dome.

Now perhaps the holes are allowing hot air from the domeheater to infiltrate back into the housing and heat up the camera sensor.

I plotted the temperatures of the sensor, air and dew from our nearby weather station and got this below.

So looking at this graph, what more can be done to lower the camera sensor temperature (which causes more hot pixels in a 60 second exposure)?

Idea 1) plug the holes in the lid to stop airflow from dome to housing

Idea 2) add vent holes at the top of the housing, below the lid and dome, to allow hot housing air to escape.

Idea 3) build some kind of airconditioner.. ie a Peltier cooler, to cool air inside the housing.

Idea 4) add a spacer between the bottom of the camera and its mount for better air flow.
Come warmer air temps in the summer, the sensor temp will definitely get too high… already in the last two weeks it has hit 15C!

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