Sprouting hops

All four rhizomes have produced sprouts.

Ease of Use

I'm trying to teach myself that doing things which will make my life easier are worth doing.

I finally put in a bit of organization to my CO2 tubing setup in the kegerator. This will make carbonating a lot less of a hassle.

Hop rhizomes in the ground

For the second time, I will attempt to grow some hops.

I took a few improved steps this time around. First off, I didn't leave the rhizomes in my fridge unattended for 11 months. Second, I did some research beforehand and feel I've planted the rhizomes in the appropriate soil mixture. I have a compost pile which has turned out some great looking compost, so I was able to mix that in with some slow releasing fertilized soil.

Here's a picture of the 4 mounds (the Flickr picture is tagged for historical purposes with the hop types). I planted Fuggle, Willamette, Cascade and Golding.

PID Temperature Controlled Solid State Relay

Ok, it's just a simple sous vide setup. Nothing really unique about this setup; lots of examples out on the web as to how to do this.

I purchased my PID controller from Sure Electronics (it took awhile to show up - almost 3 weeks - but it is very easy to setup and configure; the directions were comprehensible) and picked up the solid state relay from Amazon. An outlet and extension cord from Home Depot completed the necessary supplies and within about 20 minutes I had a test setup fully functioning.

I'm using an old crock pot as the water bath. I may try to find a hotplate that heats up a bit quicker at some point in the future.

[Edit]: I picked up this hot plate from Amazon. I've used it twice with no issues; it heats up quite quickly.

Now it's time to find some food items in the house to try out...

Micro Project: Online temperature sensor

I've decided to start creating micro projects to help keep the Arduino learning and playing from coming to a stand still. The project from three weeks ago was to get a temperature sensor reading the temperature in my basement, and then making the value available online. Using the one wire DS18B20 temperature sensor, I was able to easily read the temperature. I purchased an Ethernet shield for the Arduino a while back and was finally able to make use of it for this project.

Here is the code that is running on the Arduino: https://github.com/jimgeisler/TemperatureServer

The picture shows two DS18B20's hooked up in parasitic mode, although the code is only ever reading and saving the last value in the chain of sensors.

I then built a PhoneGap app for my Android phone that does a REST call to the Arduino to pull the value. Here is a screenshot of the very simple interface: