As normal I’ve not been doing much coding during june-july as the weather is nice out, i have been working on other stuff related to the project though (as well as maintaining my own mental well being and motivation by enjoying nature which is something i think is very important for everyone). I’ll have my high-humidity box (sagemoss) fully operational soon which will serve as a space to test operation of a range of water based sensors and various monitoring tools such as datawalls and etc while i’m focusing on improving their implementation - i’ve also been investigating options for running a small private ActivityPub server of some description (lemmy or mastodon likely) on the pi which could open up lots of interesting possibilities - such as replacing the old reddit message bot which could control some features on the pigrow and send alerts.

Great news for the project is the raspberry pi shortage does seem to have come to an end so check out https://rpilocator.com/ and you’ll probably be able to find an official retailer in your area that has stock - it means i’ve finally got some pi’s that i can build into projects without having to constantly rebuild to test other things so hopefully i’ll be able to make all the projects i’ve got planned and do longer term testing, as well as various water sensors and tools i’ve already started designing and getting the pieces together for my outdoor solar-powered build (a continuation of the solar panel monitoring one from before using Hall-effect sensors) so i’ll make a video about that after I make one about getting sagemoss running. (oh and i haven’t forgotten about my windowcill one, i’ll get that put back in place soon and update on that)

I’m also starting to try and design a system for allowing everyone to work together on the various stages of design and development for new features, i’d love to be able to work as a community on designing things by identifying areas needing testing, designing test processes to get the relevant information and working out the best ways to implement it.

I will also have a load of new code features i’ll be adding into the pigrow soon, mostly focusing on ease of use and ease of access.