The greenhouse aquaponics project has been going well.

Not without a few hiccups (my first water pump slowed to a trickle and needed exchanging, and a GFCI breaker has cut off power to the pumps twice^Wthrice over the month) but as of this morning all 14 fish were still swimming happily enough in the tank. As is typical, the water ammonia levels rose (over 1ppm) until the first set of nitrifying bacteria blossomed and are well caught up converting it all to nitrites (2–5ppm).

My nitrates had started going up (from 10–20ppm on day one to the 40–80ppm range now) but are now lagging a bit — I'm a little nervous that a relatively small top-off with water straight from the spigot set the next stage of bacteria back a bit, but OTOH it could just be that the grow bed is keeping up with the nourishment as soon as it's ready and the ecosystem might just need another week before the nitrites finish moving over into the next test tube, just as the ammonia suddenly did.

Time takes time

Basically, at a certain point the system stopped needing daily research and setup and tweaking, and just needed time. At said point my ADHD brain went into a state of near-panic. What do you mean everything's "going well"?! There's nothing to stay up late reading about if everything's "going well"!!

Duckweed

So I bought some duckweed off eBay.

BSFL

And some Black Soldier Fly Larva. (Pupae really.)

Learned all about the pond scum and the creepy crawlies — essentially both species are great for turning leftover yuckies into delicious chicken/fish food — for a week or so. Why is the duckweed sitting there turning white instead of multiplying exponentially? What environment do the motile pupae prefer for their presto change-o thing?

Then realized that I was back to waiting.

Wicking beds

So…wicking beds.

I'd happened across this idea while researching aquaponics growing techniques. Growing up in Midwest humidity, it was still baffling me just how quickly water disappears and plants dry up here in eastern Washington. Our original garden beds had succumbed to grass and needed refreshing anyway. Three of the four dug out and installed so far.

Meanwhile my wife has been busy sprouting…

MOAR PLANTS!!!!1!!!

A growbed and a whole package of paper cups full of little plants. We've got a backyard map, sketching out the master plan. Did I say "plan"? What I mean is, if we sprout it we'll have to let it grow somewhere right?

In summary, by "going well" I mean we may have gotten a little carried away with this whole suburban agriculture thing.

Other news? I've been working to get PeerPouch (PouchDB-over-WebRTC) to demo so that I can get back to my wireless sensor/yogurt maker network plans.

And just signed a contract to write a book about D3.js.

Warm weather is here — to stay, I hope! At least in a 6 ft. by 8 ft. corner of our suburban lot.

I built a greenhouse, not just because they are warm and bright and provide relaxing shelter from snow/wind/rain. I wanted to try aquaponics.

Considering the investment it's been so far, "try" might be the wrong word: I intend to grow yummy fish and yummy veggies for yummy years to come. Just finished up a few literal loose ends today:

The idea of aquaponics is simple enough. It's pond-meets-plastic, a miniature ecosystem stripped down to its essentials. The natural cycle does wind along a bit of a scenic detour in aquaponics, though: the fish don't eat, directly, the plants that grow in their water. In a typical aquaponics setup, humans eat most of the vegetables and then wake up the next morning to participate in a global economy, out of which flows units of abstract value, some of which is then converted in exchange for fish food. Put food (and sunlight) in, get plants (and occasional fish) out.

The plastic for my pond comes via a 275-gallon IBC "tote". It is cut in two, but aquaponics actually involves 3 basic components: fish, plants and bacteria. My infant system is lacking an established mix of bacteria colonies to convert the fish pollution into plant nourishment. So I'm starting off with less than $5 worth of goldfish and a handful of lettuce/spinach seeds. Both should be fairly resilient against the poor conditions that will exist until the biofilter between them catches up.

(Okay, so also we already planted some alfafa and bean sprouts from the fridge. Plus some volunteer basil starts and parsley shoots. Aaaaand some strawberries that had landed where they didn't belong. I think Hannah may have tucked some tomato seeds into the gravel grow medium too…. I'm only holding my breath for the lettuce and a majority of the goldfish to survive, but wouldn't be surprised if something else manages to make it.)

Aquaponics has been an interest for a while. It started, I suppose, with the chickens we got a few summers ago. We've really enjoyed watching our hens scratch around, feeding them our table scraps, and gathering their delicious, colorful eggs every day. We went from "townhouse with a garden" solidly into the "suburban agriculture" realm and it seems to be kind of addicting. The kids love the animals and it seems healthy to have practical pets to care for.

I suspect I first investigated aquaponics after seeing it mentioned on bbum's blog. I was intrigued by the idea of raising tilapia (a fish that even Hannah enjoys!) right in our own back yard — with lettuce and tomatoes as the waste products! Though a greenhouse has been a long dream of mine, I wasn't sure if we quite had the budget for it yet.

Then one day this winter, my friend Joe showed up with a armload of parts and began his own small setup in Room to Think's kitchen area. Long story short, my "intrigue" turned into "obsession" with aquaponics, and Hannah decided that it might be cheaper in the long run to just order the greenhouse already.

[…everybody too busy assembling to take pictures…]

It was a lot of hard work to build, in a good way and I'm proud of how it's turned out so far. This post would be incomplete if I didn't thank Hannah and the kids for helping me build and Paul, Sean, Joe, Henrik, and others for loaning advice and/or tools. Also Brian at Beaver Bark, as well as the guy at Home Depot who started saying "see you tomorrow" when I checked out. (Let's just say that compared to those Retina MacBook Pros everybody was gushing over to get…well, I hope my greenhouse doesn't feel slow and stop holding charge after two years at least.)

Now the real work begins, I guess. I'm looking forward to this next phase of getting to prepare even better homemade food, made from more ingredients that grew up right outside our house.

I've been avidly collecting a record of my whereabouts almost as long as I've been using a digital camera, and always on the lookout for more ways to collect this data. One fun way I've found when traveling by air, is to take advantage of the free flight tracking maps often found on in-flight WiFi portals. Even before you've activated full internet service, you can get access to a web map that shows your location/airspeed/ETA live — similar to the old monitors in the bulkhead, but on your own device.

I've written a couple scripts to politely poll this data and record it into my CouchDB instance. This works even if I don't buy WiFi, since the fetch request is always available and the store request goes to my laptop's local database server.

We can take things a step further, though, once fully connected to the Internet: continuously replicate the local database to a publicly-available one, then use its _changes feed directly to share a map of where I am with everyone — updating live.

It's a simple matter of shuffling some JSON around to the right places. I'm using my Fermata library to poll from node.js and fetch in the browser, and Polymaps for a lightweight map display engine, and both the data and the web app are simply handled by CouchDB. The end result is that with hardly a dozen lines of custom code on either the frontend or the backend, we have a reasonably robust realtime personal location tracking system – built and deployed while still above the clouds!

Toby and I took the train to Portland last week.

Just a day trip to catch up with some friends, but it was jam packed with both intentional and unexpected conversations.

Single pixels

Charlie Lloyd has been working to remove clouds from satellite imagery:

source

A few lines of code, a simple algorithm that considers each pixel in isolation.

Beautiful results.

Nested interactions

Jason and Erik of He Can Jog were on tour, couldn't ignore my vintage computing carry-ons, and let me commit some patches on their synth:

A suitcase plugged into 110vac rocking up the Columbia River at 59mph.

Beautiful times.

slice

I had the privilege to interact with half a dozen other old/new friends — thanks Ward, Justin, Charlie, Jacob, Ben, Tim, Tuano, Erik and Jason! Toby got to drink hot chocolate and play in the park and eat awful microwaved lounge car pizza, and we both spent the next few days taking it all in.

Had the privilege last month of adding LCD support to duino, a friendly library for controlling an Arduino from node.js — should be pretty easy to port to the node.js firmata library too. Thanks to &yet for sponsoring that development!

The work came up while I was on holiday, so with some help from Sparkfun I got outfitted with a good little mobile setup. (Embroidered tablecloth sold separately.)

Now that I'm home, with a "real" Arduino left over, I'm hoping to continue prototyping a few useful projects. These should also help me explore some "Internet of Things" problems that have been bothering me for a while:

• Yogurt maker / sous vide apparatus [more on this soon?]
• Household current sensor [since my Kill-a-Watt only measures boring things]
• Chicken coop monitoring [meh? the chickens do their thing without it…]
• Hoop house monitoring/control [if I…uh…build a hoop house first]

Since I'm mostly focusing on software (wiring together off-the-shelf components instead of designing custom circuits) the main trick seems to be getting the interface right. Which is the fun part!