apple, self sustainability

We’ve been gathering apples for the past few weeks, waiting for a cold day to press outside without yellow jackets. And well, the weather has just been too nice lately, no colder days in sight so we went and pressed it all. We did it inside the sugarhouse, space is a little tight but we can close the doors and that was immensely helpful.

Bins and trailers full of apples

Cider making is another area where we are really starting to know what we’re doing. The day was full of hard work but not stressful at all. We know how to avoid yellow jackets, how to set up and use the press proficiently, we brush hogged bellow the apple trees right before the season, picked apples at more frequent intervals. Everything is better prepared and better handled. And the result is 14 gallons of cider in 1 day, for a lot of work but certainly much less work than previous years. Experience is a very nice thing to have.

After washing the apples, we crush them

Then we press them

8 gallons, more in the fridge.

3 friends stopped by and left with cider, and we gave a half gallon to a neighbor. All vaccinated, all outside, feels nice.

The sugarhouse is very multipurpose, Robin is staining shingles while we get the press ready.

aesthetics, plots

I’m going through a big plotting batch, including a lot of creations from Mandalagaba. It’s very lucky to have this stream of material to pick from.

Most of the work here from Hava Edelstein, 1 From Lara Laubert and a couple of unknowns.

 

Fountain pen

 

I cobbled together a program to cross-hatch colors into various densities based on luminance.

 

 

I also finally have a fast SVG to GCode converter, I’ve been after this holy grail for years but always reverted to the super slow yet reliable Inkscape converter. I rewrote a fast one I found which crashed on large SVGs (the whole reason to get a fast one in the first place). It works like a charm after turning certain recursive calls iterative.

 

This one breaks my brain in the best way possible. It is soothed by the immediate pattern recognition, yet the patterns beak upon further inspection.

From PlottyBot’s preview window

 

 

Lara Laubert, another prolific Mandalagaba user, her representations of Nature leave no jaw undropped.

 

 

electronics, I.T.

For a while I’ve been wanting a more capable Internet Enabled RC car, something that could go outside. Well, I finally got working the Wild Thumper I got a few weeks ago.

This is still very much a prototype

I initial tried controlling the motors with 3 L298Ns for each of the wheel pairs, but they overheated. So I tried a couple of other motor controllers, the ones that did the trick are a couple of BTS7960s.

Rated for high current, heating is simply not an issue

I ported the Nosy Monster code to work with them, and I improved several things,  mostly around smoothing controls. You can’t just start these motors are full power, you need you ramp up and down. This is to be mechanically gentle on the motors, but it also helps with piloting.

Outside!

We’re figuring out the wifi range around the house, it’s worst than I thought, well, for live streaming video at least.

Iterating on a case for the electronics

 

The suspensions are excellent, the motors could be beefier

More to come…

electronics, I.T.

Every time I throw the Nosy Monster outside, it can’t handle even the best cut grass. The wheels just don’t cut it. So I finally splurged and got a Wild Thumper from SparkFun.

There’s a million things I’d like to do with it, and I don’t know how many I’ll get to. But at the very least, I’d love to have the vehicle able to go outside. WiFi goes pretty far around the house, and it so it would have a nice range of operation.

I’d love to set it up so random people on the internet can pilot it. Maybe via some sort of voting system.

I’d love for it to be energy autonomous with a solar panel.

And I’d love for it to be able to take some rain and snow.

The later is unlikely to happen, the rest very well may over time. Ultimately, this will be a better setup allowing for more development.

The Nosy Monster will remain in its current funny form. We’ll need to find a cool name for this new one, but I want to see what it looks like when it’s done first.

building, self sustainability

The last board is ripped to size, then I try to mimic its factory round bevel with the sander. Worked pretty well.

 

The ends having been cut need to all be resealed.

 

 

228 square feet, half of the house we moved into.

 

 

The trees are perfectly placed for some late afternoon shade. These nice trees are the few sticks which survived our reclaiming the land from brush years ago.

aesthetics, plots

Esther at different “resolutions”, rendered with Ivan Murit’s Texturing

Robin & Esther, the lines created pen motions conducive to ink goop

Nicole Texturing’d I need better lit pictures of my subjects.

I got a CMYK pen to experiment with multi color renders, particularly ones where the colors can mix into the full spectrum.

And so…

Nicole CMYK, the result is cool but I definitely want to improve. On a wall it’s a bit spooky, it captured her essence perfectly but it dissolves into chaos as you get closer.

Interpolated Random Grid courtesy of llemarie @ turtletoy.net

Bricks courtesy of markknol @ turtletoy.net

The Great Seal of Vermont, courtesy of Vermont

Appalachian Autumn courtesy of base12 @ turtletoy.net

I was looking for blue ink, I pretty much had to get this “the last color of the king”. A nod to the 1789 scholarly experiment to check if noble blood was in fact blue. Spoiler alert, it wasn’t. I love Noodler’s Ink, I came looking for UV ink and stayed for the jokes (and the quality). Gee I wonder what color billionaire blood is.

The fountain pen is loaded with it now, I’ll be playing with handwriting in the near future.

I was never an artist, at all, but I have really enjoyed how my pursuit of perfection with the plotter, mechanically, electronically and programmatically  has ended up making me care deeply about ink quality, flow, and paper properties. It reminds me of all the times artists explained their art medium and I was completely oblivious to it. I never understood that the medium was relevant, yet today it defines the boundaries for what I can do. It’s the possibility space. Much of the artistry of pen plotting comes from the various algorithms, processes, programs, one manages to get running and combine. It’s as much a skill as learning how to draw, it takes effort and skill. Only a borderline unhealthy obsession with seeing a machine wield a pen drove me develop one for years, yet today I’m happy the journey took me from the automaton to exploring more artful things. I’ve been bathing in computing for as long as I can remember, it’s nice to look outside a little. And in the end, it’s computing that took me there. How’s that for a stream of consciousness?

agriculture, self sustainability

I asked a neighbor if they were doing anything with manure from their horses. turned out they had a ton extra and were cool with giving it away. It also turned out it was all piled up nicely already, and was pretty much already compost. I left things very tidy and we gave them some soaps Nicole made, what an absolute score.

6 loads without a dump truck

I added the 2 buckets of ash we keep for icy weather. We’ll have time to rebuild our stock come Fall. We’re mixing in wood chips and grass clipping. Pretty much anything green we can get our hand on. It will be a serious pile of serious compost soon.

agriculture, self sustainability

3 year update after planting 3 little Chestnuts, piggybacking off a New York guy’s effort to reintroduce Chestnuts to American forests: they all look wonderful.

The stronger growth comes from the one that’s in the shade, go figure.

We got a few more this year since they’re doing so well and promise to deliver a bounty in a few decades.

We’ll find them a spot in due time.

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