My Blog

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For more information about what I'm interested in, see the Ponding pages.

3 Oct 2000 We found at least six survivors. We had seen one a couple of times -- though it was moving really quickly! At night we turned on the underwater lights and shone them around the pond, and there were a few fish hiding in amongst the plants. All is not lost!

12 Sep 2000 A Blue Heron found the pond for the first time yesterday afternoon. I saw a few fish left last night, but this morning it was back for a snack. I have seen no fish since then. The pondcam has not captured sight of a fish since the 13th. Anybody who has a successful recipe for keeping these sushi eaters away from a pond please send me email at the address at the bottom of the page.

26 Aug 2000 We bought two more Shubunkins from Tropic Isle as a birthday present for 'Grandma' and we hoped that she would leave them in the pond for us to look after. Happily, this turned out to be the case. I feel very mean putting them in the salt dip before introducing them to the pond, but it doesn't seem to kill them (1lb non-iodized salt to 1 Gal of water). They stay in for 15 seconds -- by the end they look almost dead and are not moving. Then I transfer them to the pond and they sink to the bottom. But after maybe 30-60 seconds they start to swim off and by the following day, they seem fine. I hope that it kills the parasites!

13 Aug 2000 I finally added the current temperature to the pondcam. It is all done in a very murky way and is not as general purpose as I would like. The trouble is that anything that happens on a per-frame basis had better be cheap (under 0.1 second of CPU) otherwise it starts to saturate the system. The final approach is that the data collector writes out a file containing the current temperature every 3 seconds, and then it is read in by the camserv code (the current time is substituted) and then added to the image (now uses imlib2).

12 Aug 2000 I found a small black fish which is turning gold. I think that this is our first baby!!

7 Aug 2000 The problem appears to be in the rain guage connection. More investigation required.

5 Aug 2000 It now seems to be working fine (after routing the 1-wire bus through the surge suppressor). I don't really know why.

4 Aug 2000 The replacement DS9097U arrived from Dallas and the system is now recording temperature and rainfall again. However, it seems much less reliable than before -- it works for a minute or so, and then stops for a minute (with the circuit being reported as shorted). I wonder if some water has got into the wiring (especially the underwater temperature sensor). Tomorrow I will route the circuit through a regular telephone surge suppressor. I guess that I'll try and narrow down the circuit problems.

23 Jul 2000 We added two new Shubunkins to the top pond. Hopefully they will eat some of the bugs up there! While in the store (Tropic Isle), we saw the feeders that we bought last year. We had forgotten how small they really were, and how much they had grown in our pond. The camera is now connected through a surge suppressor. Lets hope that this provides some measure of protection.

21 Jul 2000 Dallas Semiconductor are shipping me a new dongle (DS9097U) to drive the instrumentation bus. The general consensus was that the ESD protection did it's job, and absorbed the energy. However, it fails open, so there is now no access the the bus. The replacement will be protected behind a regular telephone line surge suppressor. Who knows if it will help?

Topic:  All Internet Radio Phone Pond Weather

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