Creuzer – Page 184 – Random things Creuzer

Beer Brats!

Tonight is the cooking club night. Tonights theme, backyard barbeque. Several of my friends have NOT HAD A BRAT! You get back in your chair yet? No… I will give you a moment. Ok, settled now? Good. No brats, I couldn’t believe it either. So, I am going to fix this. Seeing that I have this brand new crockpot, I am going to try to cook the bratwurst in it.

The cooking club is loosely (er, very loosely) based on the Cooking Light magazine. We are supposed to be trying to cook healthy and all. Ok, I got a package of turkey brats. Never had them before, but they are on the left there. In the middle are Johnsonville Stadium brats. They are precooked, so I am worried they might be overcooked by the time they are put on the grill. On the right, are the local Grocery Store Deli brats. Only 1 package of them. I checked ALL the sausages in the deli department.

My friends know that I am not a beer drinker. The only way I could walk out of the store without spending $10 or more on beer that I won’t drink is to by a 4 pack of pint sized cans (16 oz.). Two of them are in this photo along with the largest sweet onion in the produce department. Your right, need more beer.

Another pint of Miller later, I think the brats and onions look happy now. Get these all cooked up. Grill them tonight untill they are nice and tasty. Hopefully there will be leftovers so I have some for lunch tomarrow…

Waiting on parts for my fish feeder

Well, I am waiting on parts for my fish feeder. I am having trouble with the rabbitcore using both the servos and the webserver at the same time. The last one brought up is the one that works.

So, I orderd a Digilent SERVOCON AVR^® based controller board to control the servo for the fish feeder.

According to UPS:

Your package is in the UPS system and is on time with a scheduled delivery date of 04/26/2006.

This controller board will also allow me to not rely on the programming board or having to recreate parts of it when I deploy my Fish Feeder.

I will work on the scheduling software untill it comes, and then I just need to re-write the scheduling side to accomidate the web interface, and the control side to talk to the servos. Great fun! Always easier the 2nd time around, right?

Then next come the controls for the lights…

Beach Place

The beach at night.

A photo of some of the clubs.

Moon and Palm Trees.

The True Test….

Now for the true test… does it actually feed the fish? Here is a video of the fish feeder dispensing fish food. I pinched a full drum from one of my tanks for testing purposes, hopefully I remember to put it back before I got to bed tonight. I think I want to leave the one drum empty so I don’t make a mess all over the place while I am testing the software that will control this technological marval of an aquarium device!

The Rabbitcore Embedded Microcontroller Automatic Fish Feeder works! I even have a video to prove it.

Here is the front view of the feeder hooked up to my Rabbitcore Embedded Microcontroller. The Rabbitcore will eventually completely operate the fish feeder. It will also run the lights, and take the ambient temperature as well.

I am going to have the fish feeder to feed 3 times a day on a tight schedule, 30 minutes after lights on, 30 minutes before lights off, and half way in between. I am also going to “mix it up” a little bit and have it feed 2 times at a random interval. I am also going to have a manual “feed the fish” button. If this is used, it will count as the random feeding for that time period. I think this will make the fish much happier.

The fish feeder has the ability to adjust how much food is fed per feeding. I am going to have this turned all the way down, and increase the frequency to increase the the total amount they are fed. I don’t want to over feed the fish.

Well, here it is… a video of the automatic fish feeder in action. Sorry it is dark, blurry, grainy, and jerks around a bit, but it is the best I could do considering how excited I am. The Rabbitcore is currently running the servo-stop locater program that I wrote to find out how far each of my servos will run stop to stop, and what numerics I need to use for programming each individual servo. The two buttons I am pushing just moves the servo from one setting to the other. This program works well to check the functionality of the embedded microcontroller controlled automatic fish feeder.