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Thought 59: House of Cloud Pi: Part 3

Continuing on the House of Cload Pi. This though is about the software and how to get it setup and going at least for getting things staged YOCTO Being familair with Yocto from other projects, this seems like a good place to start. It means dropping the ease of Raspbian Lite, but adds the customization and flexibility we are going to need to make this work. So, first Task is to get a basic image for a pi3 or pi zero w and then we can work from there. We will be following this toturial to get started at getting a basic setup for a PI. We should be able to add recipes and modify from there. Yocto can also be configured to create cross platform SDK's which will be useful in early development. SWUpdate After getting a basic image down we should attempt to get some level of updating system in place for the pi in the field. We are not going to be able to simple remove/replace and SDCard easily if there is a pi stuck some where in a wall or too high, so having a method of up

Thought 58: Fruit Bushes as Box Wood Replacements

Been watches a lot on landscaping, gardening, and food scaping. If you are not familar with food scaping is using eatible plant mixed in with/as decorative plant. The idea is to create a beautiful landscape that you can eat. I like to think of the gardening version of Willy-Wonka's room where everything is edible (a land of pure imagination!). Along these line of watching a lot of garnding and landscapes box elders are used quite a lot as walls for creating outdoor rooms. Box edlers also get used for a lot of other landscaping sculptures, but let's for this let's focus on the wall concept. Could the box elders be replaces with some thing like blueberry and cherry bushes? Brei the plant lady does some level of blueberries as bushes, but would they, could they be sculpted up to have the same effect as a box elder? How would cherry bushes do? Would both get tall enough to create walls or would they be limited to bush/half walls? Could you creatively use something e

Thought 57: The House of Cloud Pi Part 2

Continuing from "The House of Cloud Pi." General idea is a Wifi Mesh network of pi's that can also perform as a cluster for home automation I have started ordering parts to start experimenting with various components required to build out the House of Cloud PI. The base model is going to use Raspberry Pi Zero W's as these will work for outlet controls, light dimmers, ceiling fan controls, and even RGB light controls, irrigation controls and monitoring. I'm not convienced about using them for cameras, but there appears to be much success in the community for using the pi zeros as security cameras. I'd feel better if it was a PI 4 for ones near the house as that would provide more house power. The Base Unit Pi Zero W - $10 ref AC USB Charger or USB Auto Charger - $4 ref 64 GB micro SD card $5 ref Base unit does not have headers, everything will be soldered, this will make it much more reliable. The USB power supply is the smallest cheapest p

Thought 56: A CRISPR Vaccine

Vaccines are designed to train our immune system to react to incoming virus and track component of their D/RNA. That information is generally stored inside cells inside our bone marrow. Current technology is that we find the virus break it apart and identify the piece that will trigger an immune response. What if we could change it up and simple put the information needed by the body direcctly into the storage cells? Could we take survivors of a disease and extra the DNA alterations stored in the bone marrow? Could we use that and build a CRISPR sequence that could be used to give immunity with needing to invoke an immunno response? Could end the need for endless vaccines in early childhood and start by modifying the immune system from the get go, many less injections? Could we accelerate future vaccines by already having this vetted and in place, so the time from initial infection to herd immunity basically drops to a few days? We can use crispr for virus id. ref We are pla

Thought 55: An End to Bread Ends.

For some reason people dislike bread ends and this alwasy leaves them to be turned into bread crumbs. We always cook them in a pan even the major manufactures. Now, there is a type of bread that is made without ends, but it's very different. But why couldn't someone like Wonder Bread create a convayer belt of bread and remove the pans? That is the belt is a series of overlapping U shapes. The pans drop down from the back preventing dough from going backwards. The U's are sprayed with butter/oil then the dough is dropped into the U's in a continous fashion. The belt continues forward into a low temperator oven to help the dough raise it can take an s-shape here as we are only doing dough rising, from here the dough move to a long and slow oven for the hour or so to cook the bread. At the end of the oven tunnel the bread is sliced, now with no ends. The U conveyer belt drops down and the endless loaves now move to slicing and packaging. The U's now go up thr

Thought 54: The House of Cloud PI

The concept of a smart house with a computer that is everywhere is a concept that is today possible with things like alexa and all sorts of technologies. But when the internet is down much of this breaks down to a more simplier format. What if it were possible to combine the cluster performance of the cloud with a set of smart home controllers. That is with the always on of many of the smart plugs and bulbs can we boost each's CPU power and combine that power into a cluster? The concept being take a quad core arm, but now every bulb, outlet, switch, appliance, and smart camera contains one. First would the combined house power be useful? or efficient? Efficent would be a draw of about 2 Watts per device, which be up from the near 0 most of the zigbee and zwave device produce now when they are in low power mode. Does that mean that let's assume you have 40 of these (40 from how many devices I had when I last constructed a smart home, but really we'd likely be higher o