GENOMICON

Sounds like some sort of peculiar sex-thing, but is actually a most excellent project for making Arduino compatible devices out of raw components… with the entire cost of a unit coming to about $4.

In the the time (3 months) that it’s taken me to get this together though, the price of Arduino clones on Ali Express has dropped to about $5… so making your own doesn’t really justify labour costs… if you’re planning on banging out 100s of the things (and I kindof am)(I have projects man. LOTS of projects).

I think it’s worth reinventing wheels though – because then you understand wheels. There’s a tendency towards cargo-cult programming otherwise… and a really strange thing about computers, is history keeps repeating. The programs I saw running on the very first computer I saw (in 1979) (eg: tron-style snake-games) I saw running again, 20 years later on cellphones. Then flash. Then Arduinos. This style of putting projects together by looping bits of wire on breadboards etc, I first did, building a computer from scratch in 1983. There’s a special class of wheel that tends to self-reinvent every time a new wave of tech comes out, which lowers the memory-bar.

Self-Reinventing Wheels arise out of “worse is better”, disruptive techs.

Don’t believe me? Watch this space… there will (in the next n years) be a tron-game running on bio-chips. On nano-tech. On quantum-computers. It happens every time.

Back to Shrimping… the other thing of course is that it still feels a bit weird using an ardunio (which is a full-blown computer) to perform single tasks. I mean I learned to program on a machine with 1/2 as much memory as an arduino.

(System 80 – 16kb… I wrote a tron snake-game on it)

Using a whole arduino for one thing, and one thing only feels kindof wrong. It’s like buying a DVD player, and sealing its mouth shut so it can only ever play the single DVD inside. It seems inhumane somehow.

So shrimping it is. I think I might make a surface-mount variant… because most of the things I do tend to be a bit on the tiny side anyway.

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I’m not sure if I should feel guilty about getting clones of Ali-Express rather than getting Arduinos from the proper Open-Source people or not. I got my first one (two in fact) from Arduino. Since then have acquired a digispark, and a couple of others from Kickstarter that have yet to arrive… but I do feel like I should be supporting The Source. The Mothership, as it were. Maybe I’ll buy other components from them from now on.

Still… the quick and the dead I guess… freedom from copy-monopoly introduces new biases, one of which is to compete you have to innovate faster. It’s not enough that Arduino managed to come up with a world-beating concept (or that they successfully repackaged, rebranded and brought to the world an existing concept)… they have to keep coming up with world-beating concepts. Personally I’d advise making a dirt-cheap, wifi baked-in variant.

There have been a couple of Kickstarter/Indiegogo attempts at this… but they haven’t really connected (too expensive?). I’ve been playing with an Electric Imp recently, but it seems to be reliant on “The Cloud”, and by that, I mean “THEIR Cloud”. I don’t want to go through someone else’s software service. I don’t really like the cloud to be honest – it’s a mainframe in the sky – and the purpose of mainframes is not “to help you organise your stuff”, it’s control.

Anyway. Back to soldering.

These are great:

They heat up in about 5 seconds, they don’t have a flappy great bit of wire getting in the way, and most importantly (if you’re a jittering, chattering, caffeinated wreck) you can hold them much closer to the hot bit than you can with normal soldering irons… less shake is transferred to the tip.

I’ve got two – the best ones are the ones (like the one pictured) where there’s a clear bit so you can see how much fuel you’ve got left.

Anyhoo… the shrimp above is going to be cleaned up a bit, connected to a humidity-meter/moisture-tester, connected to an electric imp, and used to monitor/water/humidify my Salvia plant… they like humidity. I have chilies as well. Have yet to try either. I expect I’ll probably try both at the same time.

Time passes…

What was once

is now

(the plant in the background is what Terrence McKenna said looked like “Joe Plant”)

So that’s cool.

It now has a little arduino controller for the pump… just a simple timer, but you’ve got to start somewhere:

Which lights up when the pump goes on:

It was supposed to have just one white light, but I’m using a mini-arduino with the relay attached to pin 13, so I also get a green and a red. I’ve put it on an hour loop – hard-coded, although I did play with different rates depending on which pin was tied-high. Thought I’d fried the arduino at one point – because it was flickering and being erratic… turns out that it was the 9v battery running down – and about 2 seconds after discovering what the issue was, I fried myself – first 240v shock I’ve had in about 15 years. Careful with mains electricity kiddie-winkies. If it catches you off-balance, it can kill you.

Arduinos on the other hand are incredibly forgiving. I’ve repeatedly done things that should have burned them out… they’ve always bounced back.

Anyway, the container needs to have silver tape wrapped round it because it looks a bit more Sci-Fi…

… and it stops algae from growing in the reservoir, and the silver stops it getting too hot when I put it out in the sun. They like sun… although full NZ sun is too much. Needs to be a bit dappled.

Had a minor attack of aphids – tried using tomatato-leaf-juice as a natural DIY method of getting rid of them – that failed, so I used proper chemical poison. That did not fail. That succeeded. That succeeded instantly.

So there you go.

I think possibly the biggest achievement this year, (apart from selling about $9000 worth of golden mean calipers in one day, and buying a laser-cutter) has been Learning How To Do Electronics. I used to do it at Uni – passed all the exams etc, but never really knew what I was doing. Now I kind of do.

This is Arduino-Driven-Hydroponics v 1.0. Version 2.0 is sitting on my desk right now… and is A LOT more dramatic… but more of that later.

Ok – the previous hydroponic seedling setup was an unmitigated catastrophe.

I don’t think the pumicy stuff drained properly so there was a kindof seedling-drowning situation going on… and I don’t think pumice is such a crash-hot medium in any case because… it floats… so it’s constantly shifting. One big advantage though… if you want to separate the seedling from the medium, you just overflow everything… the pumice floats away.

So anyway, Only a handful of the seedlings survived, so I went for an eb-and flow system.

Which actually works pretty well.

You can get these plastic bins from the gazilla-mart… where there are deep ones and shallow ones, and they fit inside each other, so you can cut a hole in the bottom of the shallow one, and a couple of holes in the side… just below the top of the plant-growing-medium… then get a little fish-tank pump to squirt water straight up. I jammed a couple of extra pots in the gaps to stop everything floating up and tipping over.

Normally Gravity never misses a chance to fuck you up, but when you’re underwater, it’s kindof the opposite – which can be just as bad and it’s actually quite disorientating if you’re accustomed to having issues with gravity being up the other way.

Let it fill up for a couple of seconds… then let it drain. None of the joints need to be terribly tight because the pump is quite strong. I cramed a load of tangled up wire down the tube, which aerates the water, and stops bits of stuff going down the tube when it’s draining.

Basically works like this:

I’ve made a little automatic timer for the pump… basically an arduino on a long loop, attached to a relay. Dead simple… in fact using an entire arduino seems like overkill, so I bought a miniduino of ali-express… which is still overkill, but it’s overkill in a smaller container.

Important Discovery #1:

Those great big plastic tupperware containers from the plastic tupperware container shop make really good light-boxes for photographing things:

If you get a bit of white artists-cardboard… sit it loosely in the bottom of the box… hey-presto:

Can tip it sideways, or shine lights in the top. I’ve found it’s quite good to have two holes…

So you can leave your camera pointed in one hole, then put your arm in the other hole (like Homer Simpson’s job) to arrange things. It’s also quite useful having an extra hole so you can shine a bright light directly into it to give the photo a bit of zing.

Important Discovery #2:

You spend more time looking for sources for components of things than you do actually making them.

This is an opportunity waiting to happen. Localised, easy-to-find, sources of stuff for makers. I made this little lamp for example:

Which took all of about 10 minutes, but I had to drive to neigbouring towns TWICE to get the various components. It’s made out of Rimu, with a special secret family recipe for the polishing oil, which is:

1/4 Tung Oil
1/4 Boiled Linseed Oil
1/4 Veg Turps
14/ Marine Varnish

I have no idea what any of these things are. There was an antique tin of it in the basement. I tried out various experiments etc, which might look similar to you…

But they’re not.

I also made a micro-hydroponics thing for my seedlings, which are the laziest arses in the world.

It’s been about 3 weeks so far, and only one of the bastard things has appeared

Which isn’t very many. I think it’s because that white stuff that the hydroponics guy gave me to grow them in is basically translucent, so they don’t know which way the light is coming from, so they grow sideways, which is absolutely typical. You try to bring them up proper, and this is the thanks you get.

I also designed my calipers website, and made a small hash-pipe out of a piece of driftwood that I found on the beach, even though I don’t have any hash – and haven’t actually seen any since England in about 1987

This is the beach I found it on

I made that video last year. Probably time I did another one.

That’s their defining characteristic… still the greatest thing written about geeks, ever.

So… picking up the pieces, figuring out what to do next.

Geeks have projects.

#1 : Hydro/aqua-ponics

I want to do interior-decor for spaceships… and that involves closed-system micro-biospheres. Silent Running. I quite like the look of those rotating tumbler ones, with the light in the middle…

Which is like The Matrix for plants…

… but first I need to get a single seedling to sprout. That hasn’t happened yet… but then again, it’s only been 3 days. I’m attempting to grow chillis.

I think the trouble with these systems is that they’re not really photogenic enough for people to have sitting round the house… and I’m not entirely sure that “not using natural light” is a terribly good idea – although it does have advantages in terms of not-blocking-your-window-space, and uniformity-of-climate… which means that “arduino-plant-growing-software” can will work anywhere, regardless of climate.

Because I’m interested in that as well… crowd-sourced plant-growing-wisdom… which has this weird effect of shifting natural-selection from the plants, to their environment. Different experiments with “how to get stuff to grow” becomes something that can be entirely software-controlled, and aggregated globally.

But first I have to get a seedling to grow.

I’ve bought a starter hydroponics-kit. Outrageously expensive for what it is (an aquarium pump and some plastic pipes… some chemicals…)… but I figured it’s probably best to start with trainer-wheels, as it were. Start with a professionally built benchmark, that I know works.

The first thing I’m going to do is to chop it in half and stack it vertically, so the water runs backwards and forwards down the sections like a rube-goldeberg machine. It’s taking up too much space as it is. Longer term, I’m going to make it into a kit/BOM that’s a whole lot more photogenic. Something that you’d actually want in your Contemporary Urban Living Space. Something modular. Something like tetris.

I also quite like the idea of having separate units, each with their own micro-climates, so it’s possibly to do that whole genetic-algorithm thing… breed/cull the environments rather than the plants. Needs to be a fairly high turnover species to do this though I suspect. I’m experimenting with moss at the moment to this end… but moss has turned out to be quite a slow grower.

The reason I’m doing this is that I attempted to make a laser-cut moss farm… using the moss-graffiti recipes from the internets…

… which wound up killing the moss stone-dead.

A month later, and all that’s developed are successive waves of mildew. So time to experiment… 3 little plantations: dirt+roots intact; dirt+roots mangled up a bit; dirt rinsed out, mangled up a bit. A week later and they’re all looking quite healthy… although only the intact one has the “solid” look that I’m after. I think they’ll all do ok… although the first two kindof have more to work with dirt-wise. After a month or so you start getting “new moss shoots” coming through… although it’s too early to tell with these yet. Only a week or so old.

Why moss?

I like moss.

My latest Art Project…

It’s a Time-Capsule filled up with all the things that might come in handy one day, but which so far haven’t.

This is just one of them – I’ve got about a cubic metre of this stuff. Me and junk go back a long way.

I made an instructional video… which went quite well I think.

So I know what you’re thinking – you’re thinking that what you’ve done is made one more thing to clutter yourself up with…. but it’s like a debt-consolidation loan. It’s keeping all this stuff in a single place. It makes sense. You know it does.

And it’s an heirloom see? It’s probably not worth all that much now, but I’d dearly love to have one that my Grandfather put together – and a 200 year old box of things that might come in handy one day? That would be excellent – from an artistic and historical point of view, as well as an ongoing, trans-generational joke.

This was inspired in part by Bruce Sterlings famous talk up in Denmark a while back.

In the latter part he talks about reducing your possessions – streamlining your life – taking everything you don’t really use, documenting it, then selling it on eBay.

But I’d like to take that one step further – instead of documenting it and selling it on eBay, why not document it, put it in a time capsule then send it to Bruce Sterling?

He’d like that…. If the entire Internet sent him thousands and thousands of clear perspex boxes of things that might come in handy one day, but so far haven’t. It would be our way of saying thank you.

He could build an igloo out of them and sit inside it, humming to self, and typing limericks on a typewriter like this

(from)

or this, but with a lot more keys.

A LOT more keys.

Mind you he does move around a lot – and maybe that’s why. Otherwise people would be constantly sending him their… “might come in handy one day” stuff. It’s hard to say.

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I’ve already promised mine to Lupita though – so he’ll have to wait until I do another one.

The plans for them are here – but you probably need to make the slots a bit narrower. I’m going to get another one made – but using a water-jet cutter rather than a laser cutter.

This is Lupita

She’s wearing cycling gear.