The timeline

After reading a neat little project by Nick Sypteras where he hacked a Staples "Easy" button to send him an alert when someone was at his cube entrance ( Blog post is here ), I was inspired. I borrowed Nick's Micropython code from his Github (link is in his article) and modified it. My goal was to create a quick notification tool for my team. I work in a fast-paced job where I will often need to leave my desk for meetings or for other urgent reasons, leaving my remote team members talking to an absent person in Slack. A person who often needs to approve their current actions. Most of my meetings require around an hour of time, so my focus was on that duration. As such, I modified Nick's code to have three buttons: Green - I am back from wherever I've been. Yellow - I will be away for up to an hour. Red - I will be away for over an hour. I like traffic light systems. My thinking was that green is a "go" for questions/comms; yellow is a "s...

I finally got my watering to work consistently. All it took was replacing the MOSFET with a switch relay and some persistence in getting the damn ESP8266 to connect to the network for more than 5 minutes. I also had my first crop: green beans (or as they seem to be called in the US, string beans). Still waiting on the tomatoes, but I fear the aphids may have undone the good work so far. So, here's the setup: Two window boxes featuring, from left to right, carrots, green/string beans, tomatoes, and strawberry. The white PVC pipe has drill holes to provide water with a length of flexible tubing entering it on the left, supplying the pipe, and the right end of the pipe emptying back into the reservoir. A design issue with this simple setup is that the pipe is too high - it can easily erode un-mulched soil. In a better-designed setup, I would have the reservoir lower than the return so that the pipe can sit on the soil. The reservoir: Nothing fancy here. A 12v DC pump su...