Hey Guys,
I haven’t been posting much lately. I’m trying to just stay focused on getting the organization and the new site in place. I have a bunch of stuff saved up that I’ll post as soon as I can. Anyway, I just wanted you to know that I’m totally watching what’s going on here and I love it. I wanted to let you guys know about a few other things afoot in this area.

1- I was part of the open hardware summit last year (co-founded the open mechanics group) and have a lot of friends who can help us out on hardware from Lil Bits, to the Arduino core team, to Sparkfun.

2- My friend is the founder of Water Canary, an opensource water quality tester device, and we’ve started tinkering with nutrient samples from the big windowfarm at our new HQ in Brooklyn to try to use his device to analyze composition of compost teas so folks can do DIY compost nutes one day.

3- Michael Doherty (neufuture.com), who’s been working with me on the Windowfarms core team for more than a year now has this awesome open mobile sensor network project that he’s trying to extend for windowfarms. I think he’s been more active in another group called sensors.

4- Let’s also think about how to tie in with smartphones. Even if it’s not a self-regulating system with injection systems, a reminder to the human operator can be a big help too. Plus, logging data about plant species, planting dates, nutrient mix, seasonal daylight hours, etc is much easier from your phone when you’re standing there, rather than having to go to your computer. I should make a post about this and get ya’ll to take the idear and run with it.

5- I have another friend who is a commercial hydro farmer. I’ve been checking out his regulator systems and he’s been telling me about the pros and cons of various commercial grade options. Let me know if you have any questions you want me to ask him.