Posts tagged with "drip-irrigation"
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Terrace Gardening Update
There are three places where we have been doing organic gardening. One on either sides of the house, two on the terrace and three outside of our compound wall. I already gave an update on the garden on either sides of the house. Since I’d like to keep you guys up to date, in this post I am giving an update on the terrace garden and the garden that is outside. Now for the bad news. We recently stopped doing the terrace gardening. There are a few reasons which I will get to in a minute. Meanwhile, our outside garden is still doing fine, but not to the level we want.
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Organic Gardening Update
As we progress in life, things come and go. We start out with a plan and later it may fail or we stop executing it for some reason. Take the most common failed plans that most people complain about – exercise. When the new year rolls in some of us plan to exercise routinely and stay fit. Eventually, due to various reasons, some stop doing it. There were several plans I made after retirement, and some of them have either failed or we stopped them intentionally. One such plan was organic gardening. Just after retiring, we started to grow a small vegetable garden in the open space on the sides of our house inside our compound. I even built and programmed an automated drip irrigation system so we don’t have to worry about watering. But we stopped growing vegetables on the sides. So what happened?
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Drip Irrigation Control System v4.0 – Web Server
In the past, I explained the hardware and software parts of the system. This concluding post on my drip irrigation control system will go into the details of the web server. As you know, I wanted to build a system that I can control from anywhere. In the previous designed, I had to be near the control system to configure the drip time and duration using buttons on the board.
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Drip Irrigation Control System v4.0 - Hardware
As promised, I started upgrading my drip irrigation control system with v4.0 design and software. If you read my last update on the control system, you know that there are two things that I wanted to add to it. One was a way to access the system via internet, so I don't need to physically configure it. And the other was to add a humidity sensor. I finally worked on the first upgrade. Now my control system is accessible over the net (currently limited to my home network). However, I had to make a few hardware design changes. I replaced Arduino with ESP8266. The why and how follows.
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Organic Gardening: Shade Net, Drips and Harvest 2.0
In one of the earlier posts, I talked about the shade net setup that we worked on in 2019. We only set the shade net on a small part of the terrace as a test and it worked brilliantly in protecting the plants. The rest of the plants outside of the shade net area were not handling the sun well. So we wanted to finish the rest of the terrace too. In the mean time, monsoon hit and the original shade net was all torn in many places, so it needed replacement. From that we understood that the shade net might need to be re-done every year after monsoon :). Eventually, after the monsoon we set down to work on the rest of the shade net project, dubbed 2.0 for obvious reasons :P
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Drip Irrigation Control System v2.0 and v3.0
In one of my previous post, I wrote about my drip irrigation control system. But there were a few problems with it. In the process of rectifying them, I built v2.0 and v3.0 control systems. And to think people were asking if I was getting bored in retirement or if I wanted to get back to work :). Why? I love what I do now and it occupies me completely.
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Drip Irrigation Control System v1.0
If you have been reading about my organic terrace gardening project in the last few posts, you know that I have setup a drip irrigation system that automatically waters the plants everyday. Tinkering with electronics has always been my passion and this was one of those fun hobby projects that I wanted to do after retirement. Sorry, this post may be a bit too technical (electronics and code), so feel free to skip.
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Organic Gardening: The Beginnings
Some time soon after I retired in July 2018, we decided to grow some organic vegetables in the small place that we have available around our house and also on the terrace. And ever since I have been planning to write a couple of posts about it. But somehow other important things came up and I kept on postponing it. Finally the time has come :). The project has been one of the longest on-going one. We still keep adding and changing things.
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