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You would like to start to grow your own vegetables but you don’t really have enough place and/or time to take care of your garden. No problem! Just go vertical and automate your garden with an Arduino Mega, an Ethernet shield, and lots sensors and valves. That’s basically what Rik Kretzinger, who grew up on a Christmas tree farm, and has a major in horticulture, has done at his home. This whole system use a farming technique called aquaponics, mixing aquaculture (raising fish in tanks) and hydroponics (cultivating plants in water), and except planting and harvest, is mostly automatized. The hard part is to set it up. The firmware is based on APduino “Internet-of-growing” open source project that runs on Arduino Mega to gather data from sensors (humidity, temperature, pH, light…) and control the valve. Rik’s system also upload data automatically to Xively cloud so that he can monitor his […]

We’ve had the Internet for a few decades, and recently terms such as the Internet of Things, previously as (connected) embedded systems, and the Internet of Everything have started to become a common features of tech speak. But following research from Osaka University and the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT), we may soon start to talk about the Internet of Insects. Japanese researchers have developed a fuel cell that can be mounted on an insect, and generate powered from sugar (trehalose) found in the insect’s body fluid (blood lymph). The fuel cell consists of electrodes, a tank of body fluid and a pipe to be inserted into the insect. Then some chemical “magic” occurs. There’s already a prototype, which has been unveiled at IEEE MEMS 2014, an academic conference that tool place on January 26-30, 2014, in San Francisco. The prototype has been 3D printed, measures about approximately 20 […]