General activity – Page 3 – Woody's Workshop

July 10, 2020

After 3 years of waiting I have finally got bees in my hive

Bees Down the Garden

This is something way left field to my usual stuff.

Three years ago almost to the day my wife bought me a beehive for my birthday. This is not one of my normal activities and it was not a normal type of beehive. The design is marketed and I believe manufactured in the UK by Gardeners Beehive and you can see from the picture below it is very unconventional. It is meant to represent a hollow tree stump and is more in keeping with the natural home that bees would inhabit in the wild.

gardeners beehive — The unusual Gardener’s Beehive that has waited 3 years for some bees to arrive

The concept of the design is that once you have bees in residence you leave them alone. No white suits, smokers etc that are the norm for conventional hives. After the first year you can add honey boxes on the side of the hive. These act as additional storage for the bees over and above the bulk stored in the main section of the hive. Taking honey from these additional storage boxes does not drain the bees main store which they need to survive the winter. The hive does not deliver loads of honey in the way a conventional hive would but you get some busy pollinators buzzing round the garden.

So why has it taken three years to get bees in residence ? To be honest I don’t know. I followed all the instructions with the hive which detail the best location and the use of lure spray to attract the searcher bees but to no avail. Perhaps it was because swarms are most common in June, July and August when we would normally spend time in France so we missed the opportunities.

This year, isolated at home, we have spent more time in the garden and we have now seen three swarms pass overhead. It is quite an impressive sight if not a little intimidating. The third one took a fancy to a pear tree in our garden and this looked like a long awaited opportunity to get some residents.

There is a couple we know in the village who are beekeepers and we quickly rang them and asked for their help. They climbed into the tree and managed to shake most of the swarm into a cardboard box and then drop the buzzing contents into the top of my peculiar hive. It was then a matter of waiting to see if we had captured the queen and the swarm would like their new home.

Friendly local beekeepers transferring the swarm to my hive — Friendly local beekeepers transferring the swarm to my beehive

All seems well so far with lots of traffic to and from the hive so maybe the three year wait is finally over.

And if three swarms weren’t enough, next day I found a small one down in the vegetable plot clustered on one of the bed protection nets. It seems it is a good period for swarms.

Bee swarm in vegetable patch — Another smaller swarm the next day

Similar or related subjects : –

June 9, 2020

Helping get cable down a duct

A minor post but it might help someone.

I had a need to run an armoured cable down a duct to an outbuilding. The duct had thoughtfully been installed a long time ago with the potential for use in the future.

The future arrived and it was a daunting cable run of over 25m. Armoured cable is pretty rigid which helps on the straight runs but when it comes to bends in the duct it had a mind of its own.

After struggling for some time I had the thought that some form of leader was needed to navigate the bends. After searching the workshop I decided a cable tie (zip tie) might be rigid enough but flexible enough. I snipped the fastener ratchet block from the tie and taped the residual length to the end of the cable as below.

A liberal coating of DC4 silicon grease and the cable shot down the duct and round the bends like a rat up a drainpipe.

Similar or related subjects : –

May 5, 2020

Supply, IC2 and USB connections over CAT5 connection

CAT5 Breakout Board

One of our group of ‘silver experimenters’ is building an Arduino based celestial camera tracker. This will be deployed in the garden and he needed all control to be routed back inside the house. The garden installation consists of a USB webcam mounted on a servo controlled platform all powered by 12V DC.

We pondered long on how we might remotely connect to the garden. The crucial thought was that the Arduino servo board was a two wire interface using the I2C format data exchange. Given that the USB needed four wires and the DC supply two wires we had a need for an eight core cable connection. It seemed like a length of CAT5 cable would do the job and we could elegantly use standard CAT5 sockets.

The PCB was designed in Design Spark and milled on the Tormach PCNC440 using FlatCAM.

There is a problem with running USB over more than 5m but I did some tests at 10m and all seemed fine which should be adequate for the application.

The breakout boards had a male and female USB connector fitted and the connections had to ‘cross over’ on one of the breakout boards to maintain continuity. We also paired the Data + and Data – connections with the +5 and Ground twisted pairs in the CAT5 so the Data + and Data – were not twinned together.

Nothing technically magic but a simple solution to a project need.

CAT5 breakout board for USB, I2C and DC supply — CAT5 breakout boards for USB, I2C and DC supply

Similar or related subjects : –

April 27, 2020April 27, 2020

How to Register Velux radio controlled windows

Velux Window Registration of Window to Controller

An Off Piste rant ….having just had a few hours of my life dribble through my fingers I thought others might want to avoid having the same misery.

We have two Velux centre hinge windows in our ‘Summer Room’. They have been temperamental about behaving to the handheld controller over the years and at the weekend they both went AWOL to the controller while open.

The handbook is a bit disjointed and has a circular path if you have a problem that does not get you anywhere apart from very frustrated.

First thing is that if you end up with the window open and not responding there is a tiny white button on the electronics box inside of the window frame which if you press once will cause the window to close. This assumes that the window has failed fully open and you can get at the button….

Now to the main problem, getting the remote control to ‘see’ and register the window(s). I got the spectrum analyser out and checked what was happening. When you take the batteries out of the controller and give it a hard bounce it takes you into a primary screen asking for the language option you want. This is followed by a Register menu option. When I selected this I could see a polling signal at 868MHz (European short range devices frequency allocation) so the controller looked to be working OK.

To activate the window to listen for a poll from the controller you have to switch off the power to the window and then switch back on. For the next 10 minutes it should be listening for the controller polling request.

Well I followed all this but the controller was not seeing the windows to register them. I could not see the ACK on the analyser coming back from the window so something was wrong.

Digging in the handbook there is mention of a ‘window reset’. The same white button that allows you to close an open window also acts as a reset button for the window. If the window is closed you can manually open it to get at this button. You hold the button down for 10 seconds and this causes the mechanism in the frame to cycle back and forth and make noises.

When all stopped and it went quiet I turned the windows off and on and re-tried the controller and immediately both windows registered.

Magic. I can now get on with something more important or at least more interesting.

In summary : –

Remove the batteries from the remote controller.
Manually open the window and press the white button on the black electrical unit on the frame for ~8 secs. The white T shaped part of the mechanism will go into an ‘in and out’ process for 6 or more times and then stop.
Close the window manually and switch off the power to the window.
Put the batteries back in the controller.
Switch on the window. You now have 10 minutes to register the window.
The controller will ask for the language to be selected and will then give an option to Register. Cross all your fingers, hold your breath and then press Register and wait for registration to happen.

Hope that helps someone lose a little less of their life trying to get this to work.

Similar or related subjects : –

April 27, 2020

Raised bed vegetable garden infrastructure details

Vegetable Garden Notes

This write up is a bit off piste to my usual engineering activities. With present social distancing in place because of CoronaVirus and the resulting shortages of some fresh vegetable foods in the shops, it has never been a better time to grow your own.

Vegetable garden layout picture — Spring time view of the vegetable plot

For a number of years I have cultivated a veg plot and it is now quite mature. Along the way it has become formalised and as a result it rolls along from year to year without really needing much thinking about. The only problem in recent years is we are quite often in France when produce reaches peak availability. Our house sitters therefore reap most of the benefit.