Author: John Poole
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Emergency Debridement Surgery
A prized orchid I purchased several weeks ago which bloomed and suddenly became overcome by rot needed quick action. I have never seen anything spread so quickly. I sent and email and left a voice mail with the Florida vendor Saturday afternoon when I discovered the rot, but they had closed for the weekend. As…
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Visual Diff Of Printed Circuit Boards
A light meter project that measures sunlight in a similar way that a rain gauge measure rainfall caught my interest. I’ve been trying to measure how much sunlight my orchids receive in the greenhouse during low sun months in Salem, OR. The project is a paper published in Electronics titled “Open-Source Photosynthetically Active Radiation Sensor…
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Blc. Honolulu Sunset ‘Wakida’ AM/AOS
Blc. Honolulu Sunset ‘Wakida’ AM/AOS My first “division” from the mother plant winning the American Orchid Society Award of Merit. This plant it is not a mericlone. A mericlone is a plant propagated from a tissue culture taken from a desirable plant. A single mericlone can produce limitless clones. Mericlones often are slightly different because…
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Greenhouse Sensors: Version 1
Below are the three sensors I assembled for tracking environmental data. I have two in the greenhouse and then one outside. Currently, the three sensors provide temperature, humidity, and power readings every second and send their data by radio to the base station where the data is then saved into a database. From the database,…
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Greenhouse: Vandachostylis ‘Ploenpit White’
I built my 12′ x 22′ Arcadia Glasshouse greenhouse in the Spring of 2019. As I was finalizing the build, the opportunity to acquire and plant the next door property, Peck Cottage, arose, so I devote my full attention and resources to the new acquisition. The greenhouse was left on life-support, if that, only keeping…
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Humidity-Temperature Sensor Scope Creep & Design Change
After letting the humidity/temperature sensor run on its own battery power with solar charging, I determined I need to have an understanding of how much battery power is being consumed, how much solar power is being generated, and how expensive (power) it is to send a transmission, e.g. 6 transmissions a minute. This is because…
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Baby’s First Steps
I took baby out for a 5 minute walk, it’s first, to take humidity and temperature readings and radio them back to a server. We visited a bedroom and the greenhouse. It was all so very new. I’m building a solar powered radio humidity & temperature reporting unit; I plan to have three of them,…
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Blinded By The Fog In August
I just configured and started running the fog generator in my greenhouse. 10 nozzles, 0.006 mm diameter pin holes with 1000 psi behind them generates a respectable fog, such as one might encounter in London’s Mayfair. When I enter the greenhouse, moisture accumulates on my glasses and I can no long see through my glasses,…
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Fogco Fog Generator Arrives
On Friday, August 1, 2025, I ordered the [upgraded] Fogco kit # 6025116 20′ Nylon Mist Kit With DD Pump which includes 10 nozzles (I upgraded to the finest mist: 0.006mm openings) and a Direct Drive Mist Pump .25 GPM .75HP 115V 10.6 FLA. I have been postponing installing a fog system since I built…
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iq Multicast
I released a tool, iq_multicast, that broadcasts a USB Software Defined Radio (“SDR”) IQ stream. The tools are written in the C programming language. SDRs range from the $50 (kit on Amazon) RTL-SDR to several hundred dollar versions, e.g. HackRF One ($300) and AirSpy2 ($180). RTL-SDR $50 AirSpy2 $180 Normally, a program or process has…