vivian lim ⭐

(if you'd like externally readable versions of these diagrams, the fritzing project, the kicad project, and a PDF of the kicad schematic are available over at my gitlab: https://gitlab.com/vogon/weather-friend)

my friend @JhoiraArtificer posted a couple pics of a homemade air quality sensor + thermometer we built together, and @ivym got curious about how to build one herself and asked if we had build instructions! unfortunately, the answer is “we kind of winged it.”

hobby electronics has gotten incredibly accessible over the past couple decades, in large part because the cheapness of microcontrollers has made it possible to throw a microcontroller at a problem that doesn’t need one, and use software instead of hardware to do all the work. liz can attest to the fact that the most we did as far as design planning was draw some lines on a piece of paper representing where we were going to solder wires to on the breadboard, and we didn’t even really do that 100% of the time. even the temperature sensor feature-creeped its way into the project because I realized I had like five of them kicking around.

so, this is a post that describes the way that project works, with the goal of being reproducible for literally anyone, even if you have zero electronics experience! (you’ll need a little passing familiarity with computer programming to build it, but nothing more complicated than what you can learn from an introductory programming tutorial.)

this is a really good (and detailed, also good imo) post that's worth reading! one thing that's neat to me, if you want something relatively plug-and-play that can also tie into systems like Home Assistant is that, with the exception of the microcontroller used, every single part on this list is also compatible with the ESPHome platform¹. not to evangelize too hard or anything, but ESPHome kicks ass, especially for building sensors like this pretty quickly and having tooling in place to get the data to other locations.

imo the way colin and liz did it is also very very good, and has the potential to teach you more (also has more flexibility on which boards you can use), i just think ESPHome is really neat.

1. air quality sensor and thermistor

(Trying not to apologize for taking a long time to draw lately) new comic j…..,.just on time

nice

the more we learn about plants the more unhinged we feel from "reality" as western culture defines it

this is good, generally, but we do just kind of feel like we opened a forbidden book

the exact details of this are hard to articulate, but when you constantly think in terms of deep time and evolution and clades, and obsess over roadside weeds that are invisible to most people

you just start to feel like you're living with your head in a very different world, a better one, while your body is stuck in hell world, dictated by humans

we used to think that "western cultures" were largely "scientific". there are antiscience factions, but nonetheless, we believed it to be driven by "science", given the prevalence of new technologies enabled by science.

but learning plant science has shattered this belief.

Here on Cohost, the "like" is as an easy to use and expressly positive signal that ultimately conveys little information and does not serve any further purpose. In Splatoon¹, the "Booyah!" is an easy to use and expressly positive signal that ultimately conveys little information and does not serve any further purpose. However, Spoon 2 introduced the "Booyah Bomb", a special weapon which activates faster by use of that signal.

The implication is clear. Cohost should introduce a feature that allows likes to be used to charge, and then fire, a massive explosion. What exactly a massive explosion would do in the context of a website instead of a team shooter video game is left as an implementation detail.

in other news Spoon 3 being out but me not having had the opportunity to actually play it yet is slowly making me unhinged

1. Hereafter in this and every subsequent post referred to as "Spoon"