Jungle Freedom Fighters

After quite a long hiatus from cooking I finally got back in the mood after being inspired by Nigel Slater

The arbour is slowly falling apart beneath the weight of several years of plant growth. So it’s all being pulled apart, plants being removed and new beams put in place. These are the beams about to be treated. Thank the good lord and baby Jesus for big sheds.

The latest in a long series of tractor repairs has been completed. In usual style it involves a tie-wrap…and as a new entry into the “crap Darren repairs stuff with” collection, we make use of a brake block from Amelia’s old bike.

Proper engineering that y’know – if you’ve never repaired something with a recycled brake block then you’ve never lived!

Just one more thing goes wrong with this tractor and then I’m off shopping for a new one….unless I can fix it with a rotary washing line and a balloon.

I had to repair the arbour and in doing so it was necessary to chop a funny angle bit onto the end of a bit of wood. I tried doing this with a saw but everything was just all over the place….and it was really really really hot. So I got sick of that and bought the beast above! I used to believe that all men had to own a tape measure. Now I firmly believe that all men have to own a Compound Mitre Saw. It took about 4 minutes to chop 10 err funny angle bits onto the ends of the wood pole things. I only ballsed up one of them by chopping bits out of opposite sides of the beam thing rather than the same side. Still, it wouldn’t be a steeley production if something didn’t go wrong along the way.

We had a night of the whole family camping in the garden. It was a great success and everybody enjoyed themselves and more importantly…slept!

At one point the children and I decided to draw on each others faces with burnt sticks. I opted for the Tom Selleck moustache

I do occasionally wear suits, but since it was Aggy’s wedding a flowery shirt had to be worn underneath

Not sure if this is illegal as such but I’m glad we didn’t bump into any police people on the journey back. The wood is to repair my arbour which is struggling under the weight of our climbing stuff

A weekend of fun in Prague to celebrate Michal’s forthcoming wedding.

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?