Internet

 The farm needs internet. For accounting, research, communication, grid management and entertainment in the evenings. I've been working on building the farm's internet structure from routers and antennas that I've collected or found. It's a bit of a hodgepodge but it works and it's a relatively cheap system.

Lately, the number of people using the closest cell phone tower has grown, and the bandwidth has shrunk. So we needed to find a new solution. One of our teammates knows a guy in Mbour who has a fiber optic internet connection, and hooked a long-range antenna up on his four story building. We tried connecting another antenna from the top of the water tower, but the signal was too weak for a stable connection. 

 I spent about a month collecting materials and piecing together a 20 foot antenna to put on top of the water tower to give us a bit more clearance and a better signal.

It worked! After some careful alignment, we have a pretty stable signal over an 11-mile wireless link. And don't worry, I used training from Army to make a modified Swiss seat from a piece of rope so I could hook in and use both hands. 

Part of the reason for expanding the internet around the farm is to be able to monitor and control equipment. Before I started nerding out on wifi relays, someone would have to walk 1/2 mile to each bore-hole and turn on the pump manually every morning at 7am. Lame. 

So I moved us into the 21st century, and installed a few wifi-enabled microcontrollers to control the pumps. They turn on and off based on the time, and have manual override switches and can be remotely operated. The best part is, they only cost about $5.

This one has a battery backup, so it's $8.

I've moved on to collecting weather data and monitoring the solar grid through a centralized server that makes pretty graphs.

That humidity line hovering around 80% is not ok.

Around 6pm, I change antenna orientation...

Unfortunately, I'm all alone in my nerdery here. For some reason, everyone's eyes glaze over when I start talking about how I fixed a problem with the DHCP server because one of the hostnames had a non-ASCII character in it, which was crashing the dnsmasq service.

(A)