It's very different the way we do it. Homestead farming that takes advantage of seasonal windows instead of heating and cooling the birds is much easier on the environment. If everyone got their chickens and even their other meats from small, local farmers who practice traditional farming methods we would ask be a lot better off
MapleEngineer
joined 2 years ago
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This is the replacement controller I built for the wheelchair lift. The controller itself is in the middle. The four board on the left and right are a testing harness. The red and black wires are 24VDC and the green and white ones TX and GND for monitoring with a terminal program on my notebook (puTTY).
Without the test harness it looks like this.
I was trying to squeeze a LOT into the BID box that I'm using for this project. I had to stack boards to get everything in.
The bottom most board is a standard bottom board for the BUD case. It has holes along each side for 2.54 screw terminals and pluggable screw terminals. I'm only using that board to mechanically connect the project to the BID case and for the screw terminals. I almost always use pluggable screw terminals because they're awesome. I can unplug four plugs instead of unscrewing 36 screw terminals and trying to keep the wires straight.
There are two top boards. The one on the left carries four relays which turn the negative logic of the Darlingtons into positive logic for the lift. They send 24VDC out to the contactors that run the motors and the door lock. The other small board at the rear has two safety relays which switch power coming in through a bunch of safety switches out to the battery relay and the main contactor.
This is what it looks like assembled into its BUD case.
This is all built around an Arduino Nano with a program that I wrote in Great Cow BASIC.
I'm working on replacing the Schneider SmartRelay on an Atlas Vista 613 wheelchair lift that I bought for my dad. The Atlas technician agrees that the SmartRelay is probably shot and the replacement is $1,000 wholesale. I built a replacement using an Arduino Nano, a UNL2803A Darlington array, a switching 7805, a bunch of Zener diodes, and a handfull of Schneider industrial relays.
Unfortunately, I let the smoke out of my very last Nano and needed to keep the project moving. So...I took a small piece of protoboard, an Arduino ProMini 168, and some jumper wire and created this Frankenduino. It's the same pinout as the Nano with none of the nice supporting stuff like an ICP port, USB, voltage regulators, etc. It will keep the development moving while I'm waiting for the 10 Nanos I have on order to arrive.
I give you Frankenduino. It's an Arduino ProMini soldered onto a piece of protoboard and wired up to the Nano pinout.
I have 10 Nanos on order but I really needed to keep the project moving.
This ProMini has an ATMEGAS168 chip on it but that's good enough for what I'm doing.
My wife made potato salad to bring to dinner at friends' house last night. It's about half hard boiled duck eggs by volume.
Delicious!
My wife has a large dehydrator. She had to fly to Vancouver suddenly a week and a half ago and left me with a huge box of fresh peppers from the garden. She asked me to dehydrate them so I spent an hour chopping them up last night while my son made dinner. Then, I put the diced peppers in the dehydrator and left it running overnight. These two 250ml canning jars were the result. Apparently she can add these to things during the winter and the rehydrate up nicely and no one can even tell.
They smell pretty good, too.
With maple syrup season fast approaching (4 months ish) my thoughts have turned to working on the Sapmaster once again. I'm going to design and build a new top and bottom board this year to fit in the BUD DMB-4774 DIN case that I use for the SapMaster controller. That's going to involve a bunch of SMD soldering which reminded me of the irritation that soldering with loose pieces of SMD tape causes me.
To that end, I went looking for an SMD dispenser cartridge that would meet my needs. I couldn't find one so I decided to design my own.
This is version 4.1 of the design. It holds around 5 feet of standard 8mm paper tape which is around 1,000 components. The tape comes out the straight slot at the upper right. The clear cover tape goes out the curved slot and can be hooked under the little pin upper left. The point of the splitter between the straight and curved slots holds the components in place so they don't fall out before you pull the tape out of the slot.
I will generally use single cartridges with a cover but the friends I work with say that they want them to connect together. I considered a number of options but they all involved pins and holes or tabs and slots and I wanted the individual covered cartridges to be nice and clean. What I settled on are the holes you see around the corners of this cartridge. The accept a standard LEGO Technics connecting pin and allow you to gang together any number of cartridges.
I'm all setup to make versions for different widths and thicknesses of tape as well. The cover has four LEGO Technics like pins to plug into the holes in the cartridge.
I expect to start printing some to actually use in a few days when the magnetic base plate for my 3D printer arrives.
My wife had to run off to the other end of the country very suddenly yesterday. She had planned to process two boxes of late season tomatoes. It fell to me to get it done. I diced them up and put them in the freezer so that she can make sauce when she gets back.
The big guy thinks that any time I'm at the butcher block in the morning I must be slicing ham. He loves ham. I told him I was working on tomatoes but he was quite persistent about making sure that I wasn't slicing ham. I even showed him a chunk of tomato and he went away but he came back 5 minutes later to see if I was still not slicing ham.
Chicken treats = happy chickens and more eggs.
The chickens love the trimmings and rejects. They were very excited when I let them out this morning and they found a bunch of tomatoes in their yard.
My wife had to run off to the other end of the country very suddenly yesterday. She had planned to process two boxes of late season tomatoes. It fell to me to get it done. I diced them up and put them in the freezer so that she can make sauce when she gets back.
The big guy thinks that any time I'm at the butcher block in the morning I must be slicing ham. He loves ham. I told him I was working on tomatoes but he was quite persistent about making sure that I wasn't slicing ham. I even showed him a chunk of tomato and he went away but he came back 5 minutes later to see if I was still not slicing ham.
Chicken treats = happy chickens and more eggs.
The chickens love the trimmings and rejects. They were very excited when I let them out this morning and they found a bunch of tomatoes in their yard.
French fries and homemade roasted turkey gravy topped with our own roasted Bronze Orlopp turkey, homemade bread dressing, and fried eggs from our backyard chickens.
Thanksgiving poutine!
Yum!
Thanks. I don't enjoy harvesting and processing chickens but it's a necessary part of homestead farming
The hose with the nozzle is an absolute must. This one is permanently attached to the plucker.
She did several people a solid over the course of her senseless battle for the hill that she died on.
... has made the fediverse an unsafe space for our queer, disabled, neurodivergent, non-western, and other marginalized comrades on this forum ...
It's like they think this is a shield or something. They spew this bullshit and they think it will stop people from criticizing them because they are so noble. We see through the bullshit. We know what they are.
Ok...several people have asked. The recipe that I used is not good. I'm still working on it. I promise that when I get it right I will post it here for everyone to try.
I used the recipe from this video. I'm not suggesting that the recipe is bad but it did not produce what I wanted which was light, stretchy, chewy naan bread like you get in a restaurant.
In discussing my progress with my Indian coworkers I know that I'm never going to get restaurant tandoor quality naan at home but what I want is to get something better than the dry, stale fake naan that I can buy at my local grocery store.
So...I'm going to try again, this time using 2/3 bread flour (I used all purpose with baking powder, salt, and baking soda to approximate self-rising flour) and 1/3 whole wheat flour. I also bought a bag of nigella seeds...
The pan that I used was a 10" round griddle pan.
It approximates a tawa (or tava depending on how you pronounce it) which is like a small, very shallow upside down wok.
I made up the dough, kneaded it aggressively (I'm a 115 kg farmer and I was sweating in the end) for 15 minutes. I'm talking a two handed, left right knead for 15 straight minutes. I then allowed the dough to ferment at room temperature for 6 hours and cooked half of it. It was not good. I then let if ferment for another 6 hours at room temperature then put it in the fridge overnight and took it out the next afternoon. It was markedly better but still not great.
The process is you divide the dough up into approximately 120 g balls. Let it rest, then put the pan on a high flame (or the highest your stove will go) and heat it up screeching hot, like steak searing hot. Roll your dough out to around 25 cm in diameter, oil the top then flip it over and wet the other side. Rub the water around. You want it to be wet and sticky. Now slap it onto the pan water side down. It will start to bubble up within seconds. Once you have a nice crop of bubbles pick the pan up, turn it over, and hold the oiled side about 15 cm above the flame and move it around in a circular motion. This will obviously not work for a non-stick pan. Once the bubbles are nice and brown set the pan down, use a spatula to unstick it from the pan, and give it a healthy buttering on the bubble side. Pan back on the flame, roll, oil, water, slap, bubbles, invert, brown bubbles, spatula, butter, repeat.
The one that I made this evening after more than 24 hours of fermenting was more chewy. I hope very much that switching to bread flour from all purpose will help. I also plan to let it ferment at room temperature for 24 hours. This is not for the faint of heart given that it has raw eggs in it but I know the chickens that lay them.
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I started working full time during the summer the year I turned 13. I was working for my family's company and my safety was always the most important thing.
In the current environment of the exploration of workers I feel that it is unacceptable for children to work for any company other than a family company or a small company that will not exploit them and that will protect them.