Let’s try and setup a meeting for Bio stuff this week. How does Wednesday sound for everyone? I know I’m not the committee lead for Bio, but it bothers me seeing posts saying that things are dying and that we’re attracting bugs and such.
In the interest of coverage, can I suggest Thursday at 7:30pm or 8:00pm? Congregate at the Bio Committee space?
If this is not workable for participants, I am open to Wednesday.
Interesting. I was just drafting an email to Andrew re meeting and organizing to discuss. Maybe I’ll post it here later. Thurs or Wed OK with me.
I am up for Wednesday. Thursday will probably be a larger than average open house night at the DMS. We may find ourselves able to straighten up a bit before then.
Andrew Floyd is a great guy, but has gotten hella busy. Without taking the committee away from him, I think we are empowered to step up and self delegate. Actually, I think he will be most pleased by the participation.
I can do 8PM on Wednesday or anytime on Thursday. I like earlier meetings but Wed is looking pretty busy and travel to DMS is becoming a pain with all the construction.
Cheers
I will be up tomorrow evening, I will try to shoot for 7pm - One of the goals is to pick up some simple tools for Bio - If we congregate again on Thursday, no problems there either
I’m fine with either day. I just figured there’s a lot less foot traffic on Wednesdays.
If we are going to do it tonight, we had better settle on it pretty soon. I would appreciate knowing early, as it takes substantial effort for me to get to the Space.
I am aiming to be there tonight around 7pm.
One thing I want to handle is the gardening tool request.
If you cannot make it, no problem someone will be able to carry over (I can) tomorrow night in the open house.
7 tonight sounds good to me. If there’s a need for it, I will show up tomorrow as well.
You know what we need? We need teleconferencing. As much as I enjoy being at the Space and hobnobbing with you guys, it gets expensive in terms of time and money (for me, about $10 each trip, which is substantial to me).
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Unless you can think of a reason you have to be there, I can take meeting notes.
Thanks. I appreciate it.
I’ll still try to show up, if my schedule at home works out.
I’ll be there tonight. I’d like to do the 3d printer orientation. I’ll see exactly when it is.
Andrew, Ben, and myself are here in the bio area.
Thanks, Andrew, Ben, Mitch for meeting. Mitch, can you reference that google bio group?
Yup I’ll get notes up tonight. I moved a piece of retail shelving in. I know it’s in the way at the moment (it blocks the fridge), but I have a great idea for it.
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I have some details re the setups we talked about (AP, drip) and I can post them here or on another site.
Sorry took me a little longer to get this up than I wanted due to some work stuff.
Notes from meeting:
What do we have now and what work do we need done?
Aquaponics Maintenance:
- Water: All water added to the system must be treated to remove or neutralize Chlorine. Replace water anytime the tanks look low(Picture will be on the next post that shows the appropriate water level for the tank). ALWAYS use the siphon to fill as pour disturbs the bottom of the tank. Make sure to use 1/2 cap start right per 5 gallons of water.
- Filters: Once every 1-2 weeks filters need to be cleaned. Open up the filter cases and wash things.
3: Marmokrebs: Need to constantly have food in the tank. They are omnivores. Good choices are Zucchini, Apple, Grapes, or Bacon. If the item floats, stab it with a fork so it will sink to the bottom of the tank. - General Tank Appearance: Clean insides of tanks. The algae is harmless, but looks bad. A scrub pad will remove it(Should be in the Bio area)
Worms Maintenance:
- Keep the worms fed. This can be any kind of compost-able material. Papertowels are acceptable as long as they do not have harmful chemicals on them. If you feed the marmokrebs, leftovers can be used for the worms.
How do we keep up with what has been done?
We have the bio committee google+ page here: Google Workspace Updates: New community features for Google Chat and an update on Currents it might be helpful to note when you’ve done something there, so someone else doesn’t make a trip up or so the rest of us know to make a trip up.
Projects and things we need to do:
Worms- Feed and upkeep on the worms. I believe Andrew said we had red wiggler worms.
@rice81 is going to look into a soldier fly capture system.
Cider- Build Press. We have 2 sets of i-beams for making two presses. Once we have presses we can make cider, olive oil, and cool food stuffs. Also, the material left over from Cider is compostable material we can use for the worms.
Mycology- I know nothing about this, but Andrew listed it on the yellow piece of paper.
Soda- To show off our bio skills we should ferment some Root Beer. It’s a great item to show off at the open house and is a great learning experience for people who haven’t done it before.
Miniature Aquaponics setup- @rice81 and I were talking about making small scale drip irrigation and aquaponics setups to show people how you can scale from something small to something large.
Miniature Drip Irrigation setup- same thing as above.
Garduinos- Arduinos made for gardening. @rice81 and I have both been interested in this, and have some equipment. We think this plus the miniature systems would be cool things to show off at the open house.
Growlights- @rice81 was looking at making our own LED growlights since the commercial ones are so expensive.
Timelapse plant photography- We talked about getting an infragram plant camera and setting it up on a timelapse to watch the plant health in the bio area. They are here: http://store.publiclab.org/products/infragram-point-shoot-plant-cam I suggest having it plugged into a computer of some kind so we don’t have to worry about it running out of space. We could easily set a batch job that uploads the photos to some sort of website, or converts it to a video and then uploads.
@BenjaminGroves picked up the supplies we asked for and they are in the Bio area.
@rice81 has some equipment that might be useful for us.
Last night I moved a retail shelving unit into the Bio area. We should probably find a better spot for it, but I think it has a lot of potential. It has adjustable shelving so we can appropriate space on it as required. It is wire grid shelving so we can easily hang Arduinos in there. It also has a giant hole in the middle. What I think would be a neat use of this would be to have several shelves full of plants, put a water reservoir up top, and then use a spiral drip irrigation setup to water the entire thing. If we get the emitters with the shutoff valves we can turn on and off emitters as we need them. With the reservoir at the top gravity should take care of the flow and pump wouldn’t be needed, just a timer. We should also build a cylindrical LED grow light. That center area has full lighting access to the rest of the unit, and we could use a single LED growlight setup to provide the right lights to the entire setup.
That’s about everything. Let me know if I missed anything.
-Mitch
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I have recently begun researching DIY grow lights and are interested in helping. I travel for work on top of taking college classes, so I can’t take lead, but I can definitely help knock out tasks and share what I’ve learned. Let me know who needs help.
I also have a couple soil moisture probes and hygrometer probes that I won’t get around to using with my Arduino anytime soon, and would be willing to share with the group.