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Spring finally showed up

We’re moving the garden to an area closer to the house and with much better soil

Found a few carrots from last season 🙂

Added 18 blueberry plants to the ~40 we have now; 18 more to come in 2 weeks.

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As green as it gets

I threw the last logs in the stove and promptly went after a couple more small ash trees. For a brief moment, we were all out of firewood.

We’ll take all the drying we can get

This is the greenest we’ve burnt, literally minutes between tree to firewood. Ash is seriously impressive.

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Solar monitoring back online

The solar instrumentation has been lacking for a couple of months since the solar panels’ current sensor blew up. It took 2 months because there has been a lot mistakes and learning along the way. It should have been simple, replace the 30A sensor by a 100A one right?

Well it wasn’t. First I ordered the wrong 100A sensor, meant for AC use. Then I had a myriad of issues around calibration.

  • at the 5V input port, a 0V reading didn’t translate to 0A, this sensor goes from -100A to 100A so it is 2.5V which translate to 0A.
  • with the skew from miscalibration, the value I was getting made no sense for what I know the panels can make
  • orientation matters as again, this sensor can read negative values
  • a cloudy day makes fluctuations hard to detect
  • moving the sensor from one interface kit to another after calibration resulted in another skew.

All these little things I could have picked on their own, but together they conspired to make me thoroughly confused and left me seeking support from the Phidgets forums. I was once more impressed by Phidgets, the help I got was fast and efficient. Phidgets are more expensive but I was proven once more that they are worth every penny. They have many other advantages, I have nothing but good things to say about them.

Calibration, I really need to tidy things up in there

I’ve learned a LOT of lessons with this one. Not the least of which is to be ok with the imperfections of analog data. I’m a discrete data type of guy, it doesn’t come naturally to accept skews & variations.