I'm looking for a coach/mentor to guide me through the hardware aspects of a automation project on my hobby farm.
I'm building a system to monitor and automate collection of spring and rain water, and to automate watering an orchard with that collected water (more about the project below). I don't believe a turn-key system exists at a price I'm willing to pay, so I'm going to build a DIY system using microcontrollers and hobby-level parts. I'm comfortable with the software aspects of this project, but completely out of my depth on the hardware side. So I'm looking for someone who can coach me through that part: from selecting parts (microcontrollers, sensors, valves, relays, etc), to building prototypes, and eventually building out and installing the system. I want to do all the actual hands-on work, but I want someone who can point me in the right directions, answer questions, tell me what I'm doing wrong, and help me when I get stuck.
Ideally, I'd like to do an in-kind trade: in exchange for hardware mentoring, I'll mentor/coach you on something I'm qualified to teach, e.g. software development, information security, or engineering management. I'm also happy to pay a fair rate. I don't think it'll be a ton of time, maybe an hour or two a week for 6 months or so.
If you're interested, send an email to jacob -at- jacobian -dot- org, and put something like "hardware mentoring" in the subject line.
I've recently bought a new hobby farm. It came with over an acre of orchard (fruit and berries, mostly) with a rain- and spring-water collection system. The system is fairly complex:
- Water flows from a natural spring into a cistern. From there it's pumped to a 3000 gallon tank on the top of the property; the elevation gradient provides water pressure to the house.
- Overflow from the top tank runs into two 5000 gallon collection tanks by the barn. These tanks are also fed by rainwater collected off the barn roof.
- The orchard is lined with drip irrigation -- 16 rows, two drop hose per row. These hoses are fed from the barn tanks.
There are many complexities, including:
- The spring generates a max of 2.5 gal/min (less in the summer), but the pump up to the holding tank is much more powerful. This means the spring cistern pump can only be run until the cistern is mostly empty (which takes about an hour).
- There are 16 rows, but only enough water pressure to water about 4 of them at once. And, of course, turning on the orchard water when the tanks are empty doesn't do anything.
- Running the pump when all the tanks are full wastes energy pumping water that'll just overflow the tanks and spill outside the barn.
Currently, everything is controlled manually: manual valves on all the orchard rows; a switch to turn on the pump; etc. I want to measure and automate everything, which means:
- water level sensors in every tank (I'm thinking of using ultrasonic sensors, but am open to other options)
- flow sensors in various key locations such as the spring outflow, pipes between pumps and tanks, etc
- rain gagues and wather stations to measure rainfall and avoid watering after rain
- a relay to control the pump (or, perhaps a valve; this is more complicated than I'm getting into here)
- electronic valves on each row
- and of course a whole ton of microcontrollers (this is one of the places I need help -- I'm thinking Adafruit Feathers or ESP32s, but ... totally not sure)
This is all made more complex by the fact that everything is spread out over a big property. The orchard is 300-500' from the house; the uppermost tank is 1500-2000' (through fairly heavy trees), etc. Electricity isn't available everywhere, so these systems will need to be battery and solar-powered. I'll also need long-ish range wireless -- I'm thinking XBee or LoRa, but again, need a lot of help here.
Finally, everything will need weatherproof enclosures. I have a 3d printer and a hobby CNC, so I'm fairly well-set-up for that part, but could still use a bit of guidance here too.
If this sounds fun, send an email to jacob -at- jacobian -dot- org, and put something like "hardware mentoring" in the subject line.