Jungle Freedom Fighters

The whole chicken coop escapade even made it on to the BBC website…

The cunning plan finally comes to fruition. Yesterday Elaine Dunkley of North West Tonight came to my house and filmed a piece about the hen house hoist chickens in space project. My life is now complete. They broadcast three segments all of which have been stitched together below. My favourite bit is when the bottom bar is on screen showing “Darren Steele, Inventor” or as my buddy Chris Phelan points out it should have said “Darren Steele, Eejit”

Aggy is getting married soon so his suggestion was that we all go and climb a mountain in Wales, and then drink beer. I just heard the bit about beer.

This is us just before we reached the summit. We’d all just had some sandwiches and crisps and were feeling a little more human…

This is the nutter slope we had to slide down. From the top you could make out the A487 below, far far below. So far below that you could make out the road but not any cars travelling on it. It was stupidly high and stupidly steep – but was our best option for getting off the mountain and into the pub.

…and this is the same slope viewed from the road…

Finally a picture of my breakfast making facilities:

This will hopefully form part of my ongoing raspberry pi fun. However in between now and said fun there has to be an element of soldering. Oh dear.

The first two solders went OK. Only 24 more left to do

My electronics teacher would still despair at my soldering skills. They haven’t improved much in twenty years

I’m actually quite proud of this bit of soldering. I may well be getting the hang of it!

The finished project. A raspberry pi controlled digital thermometer for my office. I now have to write a bit of code to log it to a php graph page but that’s the easy bit 🙂

A slightly more polished video than my usual efforts. It shows a bit of the C based client/server code to control the winch and it also has screenshots of the Android app code. All set to a rather wonderful track by Richard Strauss. Made famous by 2001 : Space Oddyssey. Enjoy Also sprach Zarathustra!

Since I’m now using my Raspberry Pi as a proxy between my wireless webcam and my box.com cloud storage I kinda needed a bit more “disk” space.

Before [8GB card ] :

After [64GB card ] :

That should keep me going for a while

I put together a quick and dirty android app that connects to my raspberry pi socket server. This means I can send the hen house down again if there’s a wayward chicken that missed the curfew.

Android purists will no doubt complain that it isn’t holo enough but mehhh, just… Mehhhh

My raspberry pi revision 2 couldn’t provide enough current to drive my relay board and lift the chickens into the air. See those black and red wires I soldered on? Well now my pi can. My electronics lecturer would be proud of me.

After our local rat hobbled off with my springy rat trap Oliver and I decided to follow some plans from the internet and build our own home-brew rat trap.

We had to dig a hole in the ground and insert a smooth sided bucket

Then it’s necessary to thread some stiff wire through the centre of a corn cob so that it can spin. The idea being that the rat crawls along the wire to eat the corn, spins around and splashes into the water below…and drowns.

I haven’t caught anything yet but as usual I’m eternally optimistic, and if in a few days I still haven’t caught anything then I’ll add peanut butter.

Our traditional new years day walk. A windy Southport pier was this years venue. Very bloody windy.

Big steps have been made. I finally have the relay board hooked up to a controller, in this instance a mac-mini until I get a powered USB hub for my Raspberry Pi. The wires are now running into my office via a hole in the wall and a cron job is all set up to wich the chucks up at 5pm tonight and bring them safely back to earth at 7.30am tomorrow.

I still need to get a ground anchor thingy to stop the chickens swaying around too much at night but other than that we are so very very nearly there.

My chickens can sleep safely from now on.

Queueing for the tip with Oliver as my copilot. This is what every dad is doing on the day after the day after Christmas day right?

I had to move my wiring from the switch to my control circuit. In doing so I kinda mixed up which wire was which. After a bit of trial and error we’re back in business. The above crocodile clip contraption just made my which go down. Quick check to see if it goes up again… Yep. It does all sorted

I turned off my Apple Thunderbolt Display for the day and was a bit distressed to see all this crazy stuff inside the screen.

Most of the stuff is condensation [ which is bad enough ] but the funny curvy shapes must be from condensation in the past that has dried and left water marks. I’d spotted the water marks when using the display, they were clearly visible above white pages. I immediately got in touch with Apple since the monitor was less than twelve months old. I described the whole problem to some helpdesk guy in Ireland who took my serial number, tried to sell me some Apple Care package, tried to sell me something else and then promised to send me a list of things to try that might fix the problem. He sent me an e-mail about resetting the PRAM on my MacBook Pro. This is worth repeating. To solve watermarks on the inside of an Apple Thunderbolt Display he suggested resetting the PRAM on my laptop. The guy was, and probably still is, an idiot.

Putting Apple Helpdesk idiocy to one side I searched the internet for a solution. Turns out it’s remarkably simple. Take one child’s suction cup toy thingy, rip off the “glass” front of your monitor from the magnets holding it in place, give it a bit of a wipe and then reattach the front “glass” to the monitor with the built in magnets. People waffle on about doing it in clean room conditions but if you get some dust in there then pull the front off, clean it again and then put it back again. You’ll get there eventually.

It’s still being controlled by hand but as soon as my relay interface connect to the RaspberryPi thing turns up we’ll be cooking on gas.

The major problem with the winch as it was is that the cables were about 2m long. Clearly not long enough to be mounted 4m in a tree. So I had to buy 100m worth of 3-core cable and rewire the entire winch. Since it was prohibitively expensive and difficult to buy 5 core cable I had to be a little naughty and use two pieces of 3-core cable.

My strategy was to take a bunch of pictures of how each end was wired up, take it apart and then put the new cable in. This strategy worked really well except I took the pictures, took it apart, got busy for two months and then came to put it back together. The break away from the project didn’t help…but I eventually [after several serious mistakes] managed to get the whole lot wired up again. My winch now has 11m of mains cable and 11m of control cable coming from it.

The two desks in my office were gradually overtaken with tools, photographs, bits of winch, electrical components and paper pads full of my schematics trying to work out what was going on inside the winch.

What isn’t shown in any of these pictures is that the winch controller has a MASSIVE capacitor in the handle. The intended purpose of which is unknown to me, but an auxiliary purpose seems to be to give me a right electrical belt when I accidentally touched the wrong place. Made my entire hand go numb. I think I should stick to software in the future.

Even though I’ve just accepted a Head of Android role at rentalcars.com my love of iOS products continues unabated.

I managed to bag myself an iPhone5 on launch day and jolly happy I am with it too. Yeah the maps app is not as good as the Google maps on ios5 but I have faith that the people in Cupertino will sort that one out.

Here’s a blurry picture taken in my car just after picking the phone up:

As alluded to in my previous post my Raspberry Pi arrived a while ago. It took me a while to get it up and running but I’ve now found that a £4 SD card from Aldi does the trick perfectly.

I solved the issue of hanging the winch level using a couple of turnbuckles. My remaining engineering job is to interface the raspberry pi to a 240v ummmm switching thingy … oh and then I have to write some code to winch it uppy and downy but that *should* be the easy bit.

A while ago a fox ate ten of my chickens, leaving only “Lucky” behind since she decided it was wiser to roost on top of a shed. It gave me an idea. All I needed was a winch, a raspberry pi controller and the cunning use of a few bits of rope.

Mk1 was a test to see if everything worked out. It was a success. The winch was able to lift the chicken coop into the tree but I had to defeat the safety mechanism on the winch as the coop was being lifted off-centre and was causing the winch wire to drag on the safety cut-out and activating it.

The raspberry pi controller will be used to grab the sunrise/sunset times from the internet and at sunset will activate the winch and drag the coop [ hopefully with the chickens in it ] up into the tree. Then at sunrise it will gently lower the chucks back down to the ground. An added bonus of using the raspberry pi is I can introduce a Pavlovian response into the chickens by playing a tune a few minutes before the coop goes up. This will hopefully herd them all into the safety of the coop. I realise I may be attributing too much intelligence to the chickens!

Engineering issues left to solve:
The winch has to be perfectly level or the cable all bunches up at one end and this is not groovy. So I must find a way to suspend about 300kg of weight with millimetre accuracy.

I have to interface the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi to a 240v winch. I’ve yet to take the winch controller apart and work out what voltage we have going through the controls.

The latest delivery of fox food arrived recently. They’ve already started laying some eggs so it’s back to fresh poached eggs for breakfast for Emma and I. I’ve also put together a rather cunning plan to save my chickens from future fox attacks….more of that later though