Progress on all fronts

 

Things are looking up! 

We have relocated the bird feeder to the middle of the lawn, the better to protect the little critters from predatory cats, and also to thwart the embarrassed squirrel, if he (or she) should ever overcome the ignominy of falling off last time, and return to try to steal our nuts again.  The lovely Jackie cut and folded back a square of turf and dug a little hole for position, and I brought in the pro tools - Leo's post hole device and his big pointy steel stick.  The post hole device is like a pair of steel hands, hinged at the wrists, that you throw vigorously down the hole.  Then you lever them together with the long handles provided and lift them out, complete with a handful of soil clutched between them.  If the ground is hard, you have to break it up a bit first, by throwing the big pointy steel stick down there a few times, point first.  In this way you can dig a nice clean cylindrical hole, about eight inches across, up to (or possibly down to) two or three feet deep. Then you stand your bit of aluminium tube in (with the bird feeder post installed, and 2-axis spirit level (specially for posts) attached, and put all the soil back in again, this time tamping it down all round as you go, with vigorous blows from the blunt end of the big pointy steel stick.   Keeping an eye on the spirit levels and adjusting for verticality all the while, of course.

Post, with various tools (and aluminium tube offcut)

So far so good, but I still hadn't decided how to make the thing usable by people of modest height when refilling the bird feeders.  Of course I went through various ideas involving hinges and sleeves, and we even discussed lifting the whole thing bodily out of the ground, without finding any appealing solutions.  Somewhere along the way I found myself explaining how a pip pin works* to the lovely (and ever-tolerant) Jackie and remembered that windsurfers used to use a pair of pins mounted on a U-shaped spring for exactly this sort of telescoping tubes requirement.  I used to have windsurfers many years ago, and even though I did once have to saw one of them up to take it to the dump,  I kept a few of the more more portable bits - like the heavy duty mast foot connector.  And so I had just the thing.

So now you just lift the pole, press the little blobs on either side together, and slide it all down into the ground, leaving the feeders at a comfortable height for maintenance.  When you're done, you lift it up, and a satisfying click tells you that your work is done.

Although installing this gizmo part way up the tube did necessitate making a special tool, it was only a bit of aluminium tube with some notches filed into the end, which wasn't really much of a stretch, technically. So I made a little plug for when you want to mow the lawn.  You can remove the bird feeder pole to a safe place, and plug up the hole to stop any bits of stuff falling in while you mow over the top.

Here it is being a plug...

plug

...and here it is showing off its tiny little retractable handle.

tiny little retractable handle

 Awww!  

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, parcels have begun to arrive.  Two 4-channel USB relay boards (Chinese ones this time - £5 each brand new) the other day and today, the three-port motorised gate valve!  Which is also from China...

Here it is, looking pretty funky on the sofa:

pretty funky

It even comes with a User Manual, written in English - sort of.  But it's not all completely plain sailing.  On the top of the casing, it mentions AC220V 50/60Hz (which is promising) and shows the connections as two live - "BR" and "BK" and one neutral - "SR".

That might me OK if the wires were Brown, Black and, er, Sun Ripened? Spring Roll? Snow Reopard?   But no.  This is the actual cable they used for two live and one neutral wires:

two live, one neutral

 

Which is not quite the way we do it in the UK, as I'm sure you are aware.  But I'm sure the User Manual will make it all clear, no?

The User Manual is eight pages long, but the pages are only 100mm x 70mm.  Still, they manage to cram a lot in there, by simply writing in very, very, very small letters. The largest characters on the page shown below are less than 2mm high, and the smallest ones are so small as to actually be completely invisible!  Here is page 3,, showing the the ever-useful "Electric Principle Diagram", with a biro for scale:

gigantic biro

OK, here's the important part made a lot bigger:

Electric Principle Diagram

Ahah! So there are two wiring diagrams - but no clue which one is relevant.  No worries, I know this is supposed to be a CR3-01 layout - so it must be the bottom one.  "Three wires two controls", don't you know. Now the wires are usefully labelled ON, OFF ,and N.  But the colours have changed to BL, BR and SR.

At this point one could just infer that SR means "yellow with a green stripe" in some world, and bash on, but since the valve is liable to destroy itself if one wires it up wrongly, my preference is - take it apart and see what's happening inside. Fortunately the case is held on with actual screws.  It turns out that Yellow and Green is indeed neutral(!); applying power to the Blue wire moves the valve to straight though (which they call ON, or perhaps OPEN VALVE), and powering Brown moves it to divert to the side port (or OFF, or CLOSE VALVE).

So that's everything cleared up then.

Except for this feature:

a worra, or Chinese arrow

I am not a real plumber, so I accept that I may be barking up the wrong pipe here, but I would have thought that arrow cast into the housing on the right shows the way the water goes in.  Seems a reasonable guess, anyway.  Actually no - that's one of the ports which gets blocked off.  The available states are:

  (1) The arrow port is connected to the straight-through port, and the side port is blocked

  (2) The arrow port is blocked, and the other two are connected

The actuator mounts on the valve body like this:

I hope you can see how this works...

I hope you can see how this works - when it's all screwed together, the actuator body is keyed to the valve body, and the spindle is driven by the actuator.  Note that all these parts are 180 degree rotationally symmetrical, so it doesn't matter whether you mount the actuator with the lead at the front or the back, it still does the same thing - the actuator still rotates in the same direction through 90 degrees, and back.  However, the valve ball itself has a tee-shaped hole through it, which is not 180 degree symmetrical.  If you rotate that 180 degrees within the housing, the possible outcomes are: 

  (1) The arrow port connects to the side port, and the straight-through port is blocked

  (2) All three ports are connected together

   

Alas, this isn't a very useful arrangement.  It's just a two-port valve with an extra port that's always connected to the arrow port. So did the folks in the factory put the valve ball in upside down? Or do arrows really work the other way in China? They do write from right to left, after all.  Who knows? 

Well, maybe the User Manual can help:

AB to A what?

The note reads "Attention: When you assemble the actuator and valve body, the angle of actuator power down-lead and valve body should be 90 degrees".  Which is simply not possible with my valve components (as you can see in "worra - a Chinese arrow" above) even though it clearly was possible when they took that picture for the book.

And that diagram of the "3-way"!  It says: "The direction of flow: AB to A  AB to B" - but they have sadly neglected to label the ports.  The arrows certainly suggest that the side port is common, and the valve should select which of the others connect to it - but then again, those are Chinese arrows.  And that arrangement is not possible with the bits I've got.  You would need a ball valve with only a right angled hole in it.  And be able to mount the actuator the appropriate way round - one might almost say, "at the right angle".

All this is really neither here or there is the long run, since I can get it to do what I want merely by filing off the offensive arrow, and going left-to-right instead.  I just thought you might be interested.

Still the User Manual does contain some useful information, such as this "Installation Notice":

"Please keep the temperature of pipeline and the valve.

Do not put the actuator inside of protected cover"

OK.  I had been planning to put it in a nice box, but now maybe I'll just leave it out in the rain, and hope for the best.  Just as well it's got a CE mark, eh?

 * If you don't know what a pip pin is, here's a pretty animation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLTZiNngk9c

Gardening, again

Apart from the watering system, and investing large sums of money in plants, soil improver and the services of Jason the gardener, I haven't really had much to do with the progress in the garden.  But progress there has been, and the once tiny plants are mostly bursting forth all over the place.  The most spectacular of all is the raspberry patch we inherited from the previous owners, which is just astonishing.  We are now in the middle of the fruit season, and it creates at least a pint or two of large, perfect, beautiful tasty raspberries every day - yesterday we processed a haul of 2.3 kg of them into coulis, and still ate a huge pile for supper.  We've had the neighbours in to pick them, and given them away to people, and they just keep coming.  

Meanwhile, with the help of the local sparrows and their specially adapted beaks, my bird feeder has propagated a splendid crop of grass where the excess seeds fall into the flower bed underneath it.  Alas, this wasn't in the planting plan, and the lovely Jackie disapproves.  So the bird feeder must now be moved to a socket in the middle of the lawn, and the modified fence upon which its intricate latch machinery is mounted must return to its previous state.  That didn't last long, did it? Still, it was only a prototype.  It does mean buying a suitable piece of square tube though.  Oh well.

Also only a prototype, the automated irrigation system has been such a resounding success that it has outgrown the capacity of the recycled water system's pump to supply everything at once, so I am now obliged to modify it into zones.  This means having a motorised ball valve out in the garden, to switch the water to either the bed with the new fruit bushes (but not the old raspberries) or the bed on the other side of the lawn.  While we're about it I've splashed out (ha!) on a motorised ball valve to control the on/off state instead of the washing machine valves.  Ball valves provides less restriction to the water flow, and they don't take any power when they're open, so you don't need pauses in the watering to let them cool down.  Alas, the new valves must perforce be purchased - but the washing machine valves can go back into stock.

Of course two valves instead of one means we need a multi-channel USB relay board, which means a new box under the counter top too.

So essentially, all the interesting bits of these two projects are about to be replaced.  As I said, they were only prototypes...

Meanwhile, at the other end of the garden, the raspberries still need frequent watering.  If only it would rain occasionally, the nearby water butt might be of some help, but it's always empty these days, so it seems a bit silly to use that in an automation project.  I may have to extend the plumbing of the rainwater recovery system through the back of the garage and use that...  So there's a use for the single channel USB relay board, right there.

Then there is the issue of the pots.  The terrace is positively littered with pots containing flowers, which also have to be watered.  So that's another possible automated system.  The problem there is that the layout is liable to change at any time, according to the aesthetics of the moment, as sensed by the lovely Jackie.  Which makes laying out the little hoses a bit more difficult than it is for a flower bed.  Maybe leave that one alone for a while.

littered with pots...

...but no hoses

Meanwhile, the garden seat you see in the picture above (and closer-up below) has become a project once again.

It used to be a bench, but the wooden bits rotted away so to avoid throwing it away completely, I replaced the wooden bits with shorter wooden bits made of left-over decking, and made it into a single seat.  The enormous weight of this chair has turned out to be quite an an asset when you want to tie something down.  Like the garden umbrella, for example.  Or possibly a dirigible of some kind.  Anyway, now, it seems, we need a bench again, to go on the newly-paved corner you can see behind it in the picture above.  No problem, I've got all the wooden slats of the old spare room bed (no longer required since it was built specially for the old house and is now too small) which will do quite nicely.  Although they will have to be painted - grrr.  Incidentally, if the new paved area looks a teensy bit off flat to you, well spotted - and I have new found respect for people who can do better than that with slabs on (left over from the terrace) sand.  I can't!

The poor old trampoline has been somewhat repurposed, too, since I gave up my front flip adventure.  I chopped up all the fencing we removed when the terrace was build and used it to make a sort of den for Layla, by enclosing the trampoline.  The tramp base moves around a fair bit when you jump on it, so the fence has to be quite flexibly mounted - basically it stands on the concrete pads, and there's only only one attachment per panel, and a strap to the next panel.  

I don't know how it will stand up when Leo gets going on there though.  Bits may well fall off.  Anyway, it's only a prototype.

I also made a hinged door using some stainless pipe clips for the pivot and a bit of old bike cable to hold it up.  For some reason I find the separation of axial and radial loads in this arrangement strangely satisfying. 

hinge

It's probably just me though.  

Anyway, it's only a prototype.