Monthly Archives: September 2010

Cabinet for My Garden Webcam

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I have an old Sandberg webcam that I want to use as garden webcam connected to my NSLU2 computer. It’s going to be mounted outdoors but the cabinet I bought is too small to house the webcam when the stand is mounted so I removed it from the camera body:

I’m mounting the camera body on a metal angle:

One side of the metal angle is covered with two pieces of double sided adhesive tape and the camera sticks quite well to the metal angle. I don’t want it to roll around in the cabinet:

Now that the camera is locked into position I just need to make a hole for the USB cable and mount the whole thing outside:

It’s actually a plastic box from the supermarket I’m using as cabinet. I’m sure it will protect the webcam sufficiently to get through the winter, and it’s much cheaper than a professional electronics cabinet.

Saving Coriander Seeds

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Having fresh herbs just outside your kitchen door is great and this year we had 8 different herbs growing in two large metal tubs. One of them was coriander and it grew like crazy, suffocated the other three herbs in the tub and threw itself out over the edge of the tube and down on the terrace:

I realized that fresh coriander taste and smell very different from the dry powder you buy in the supermarket. I really don’t like the taste or smell of it – I think it’s synthetic in some way. I’ve decided to collect the seeds instead hoping the taste is better:

The seeds need to dry before grinding so I cut down the entire plant and hung it upside down next to the spinach plants:

Hopefully the seeds of both the coriander and the spinach plants will be ready soon. I need the coriander spice for my falafels ;-)

Debian NSLU2 for Garden Webcam

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Update 2011-09-05: I have created a new blog about electronics only – check it out here: Electronic measurements, NSLU2 and soil moisture sensor

I’m setting up my NSLU2 computer again because it can help me in the garden as a monitor and control device. You can attach a webcam or monitor things like air temperature, soil temperature, air speed, soil moisture level, how much it rains etc., and you  can control things like sprinklers, or fans and doors in a greenhouse etc. I’m going to build an indoor aquaponics system during the winter and the NSLU2 box will become very handy as a monitoring and control device for such a system.

It’s been a long time since the box has been up and running and in the meantime I lost the USB memory stick with the operating system, so I had to install the Debian system from scratch. I went to http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Debian/HomePage but they referred me to http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/. I transfered the di-nslu2.bin to the NSLU2 using the upslug2 program on my Ubuntu 10.04 PC. The new Debian installer worked perfectly and automatically retrieved the rest of the software from the Internet via the NSLU2 Ethernet port connected to a switch. I had to watch the installation and answer question or else I would get a time-out and would have to start all over with the installation.

With Debian installed on my NSLU2 I’m ready to connect a webcam and place it in my garden so you can check in and see what I’m doing at the moment.