My hops are exploding. The Nugget have climbed up to the top of their twine, and are now exploding with hop burrs. SHould get quite a good yield this year from them. Suprisingly enough, the Nugget might be rivaled by the Zeus for yield. I can’t believe how many hops these rhizomes are producing, even [...]

…about wireless antenna design. That’s what I have come to realize. After placing that antenna spiral on the PCB, I decided it might be prudent to Google the subject matter of wireless antennas, and found this paper. Basically, the spiral probably wouldn’t have hurt anything, but its damn near worthless too. As a result, I [...]

Alright, so I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I was looking at my main board during lunch and realize that a little reorientation of the power supply would better position the fan and power headers, as well as putting the sensor headers closer to the back of the control box (meaning less medusa factor). It [...]

My batch of single-sided presensitized copper-clad boards arrived today from Allied Electronics and I am ready to etch my boards for the pump skid control box. These things are 9″x6″, so I will cut them down to smaller sizes as needed. I have found that both a jig saw and mitre saw do decent jobs, [...]

… But not the homebrewing type. I’ve been collecting the necessary tools to venture into home Printed Circuit Board (PCB) manufacturing, such as drlll bits, exposure sources, and developing & etching chemicals. At this point I have got pretty much everything except a drill press for my dremel, which is on backorder and should arrive [...]

So tonight I spent some time playing around with Diptrace and I think I’ve arrived at a relatively clean PCB design for the main pump skid board. As I’ve stated in previous posts, I intend on splitting the sensor and control panel boads from this main board and using 10-pin headers to connect them together. [...]

Well, I banged out 95% nthe complete pump skid circuit tonight… this includes reading two temperature sensors (LM34s), controling two pump SSRs based on both level switches and the manual override “ON” switches (although I did not bother hooking the SSRs and pumps to the darlington driver IC). It also calculates the elapsed time between the low [...]

I am so friggin frustrated. I spent the entire evening trying to get my 28X PICAXE chip to talk to a DS1307 real time clock chip using the I2C protocol. It has been over 3 hours, and I am no closer to getting this thing to work. I have ripped everything out except the pieces [...]

I’ve been slowly working on the grant / pump skid prototyping. Some more electronics components (primarily a new Crydom 1210 SSR, heat sink, and a load of Molex headers) came in from Allied Electronics today, and I spent some time figuring out how best to crimp the wire into the header socket terminals. They are [...]

I’ve been spending most of the last week reaquainting myself with all the knowledge I’ve lost on electronic circuits since college. I ordered a copy of “Practical Electronics for Inventors” using an Amazon gift certificate I got for my birthday, and I have found it to be a very good reference. You can get as [...]