I am a Xamarin Most Valueable Professional (MVP), Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP, Microsoft Internet of Things MVP, Microsoft Azure MVP, Architect, Software Developer, Organizer and Sponsor of the CPTMSDUG, JHBMSDUG and DBNMSDUG User Groups and father of 2.
Thank you everyone who attended my session at both DevConf Cape Town and Johannesburg I met so many awesome people during DevConf inside and outside of my session! Thank you for making DevConf 2024 the incredibile conference it was!
I’ve included the slides for those interested in building your own DIY Microscope, or something similar to help you with your own accessibility challenges. If you have an imaging device with some intelligence, there’s so many things you can do!
The project is using a Raspberry Pi 3B (4 and 5 works too). It is build using C# and .NET 8. The user interface is created using AvaloniaUI. There’s nothing better that Avalonia if you need to create small, incredibly fast user interfaces on Linux using .NET. I really recommend trying it out!
The backend is using Azure CosmosDB for storage. The MongoDB VCore Implementation. This is chosen for it’s vector search capabilities. Perfect for a conversational solution using OpenAI.
The whole premise of the talk was to inspire developers to think about using all these tech components in your toolbox. Both AI and IoT bits and use it for good. There’s so many solutions that could be created especially for accessibility, to make people’s life a little easier. This is also exactly why I created this Microscope, to solve my own accessibility problems when building IoT solutions. Think about what you could do!
Supervisor is a service which can be used on a Raspberry Pi to ensure processes keep running. If there’s an app that requires execution 24 / 7 then SuperVisor is perfect for this. Perfect for kiosk solutions.
1. Install Supervisor
Log into the Raspberry Pi
At the command prompt type: sudo apt install supervisor -y
2. Start Supervisor the Supervisor Service
At the command prompt type: sudo service supervisor start
3. Create a Supervisor Process
Use an editor such as nano to create a project file project.supervisor.conf in the /etc/supervisor/conf.d/ folder
Add this to the contents of the file
Create file project.supervisor.conf in etc/supervisor/conf.d/
and put:
[program:microlights]
user=pi
directory=/home/pi/MicroLights
command=sudo dotnet /home/pi/MicroLights/MicroLights.dll
autostart=true
autorestart=true
stdout_logfile=/home/pi/MicroLights/stdout.log
stderr_logfile=/home/pi/MicroLights/stderr.log
4. Request Supervisor to re-read configuration and Update
Thank you so much to everyone that attended my session. It was a lot of fun and the audience was great!
Also thank you to the sponsors for making community events like this happen, the organizers and the amazing venue at the University of the Western Cape.
Here’s the slides as promised and also all the links to further learning and also links to our Cape Town MS Developer Community was more tech learning fun.
The home farm is working well, but time to try and make some improvements. I’m going to try my hand and “Smart” Composting. Going to start with a Bokashi and also some worms with VermiComposting.
More on the home Smart Farm here. Since this talk at DevConf 2023, I’m so happy and also inspired to see so many new home farm smart farmers!
Composting is a given as the soil here in the garden is not great.
Sensors and likely some AI is a given here to mazimize the output of the compost. I’ll post more on how things go and what I’ve learn from the process. It will be a lengthy process to measure the benefits.
Step by step instructions, when I know what I’m doing will follow. 😊
Thank you to everyone for attending the Microsoft BUILD After Party 2023 in Cape Town. It was held in the Cape Town Waterfront at our venue Sponsor Accso.
Thank you everyone who attended my session at both DevConf Cape Town and Pretoria I met so many amazing people excited about creating a more sustainable future.
This is a quick blog post which includes the presented slide deck. I hope attendees found the talk useful. It’s a very broad topic and fitting months of content into 40 min is a little challengening. So the presentation is a broad overview of the completed farming project project and there’s links to more deeper content within the slides. This includes content and github repositiories with some source code examples. The plan is to also release ALL the content eventually as a full OSS project when I’m happy with it, including the Mobile App and integrations with the cloud components. I’m currently rounding everything off to do this. So expect a few more posts about this and source code.
There is also Agri hacks planned where we can hack and learn about this topic together over a few sessions where you can learn hands on how to build something like this project. This will be a free to attend event held at @CPTMSDUG in Cape Town. Keep an eye out here: https://www.meetup.com/cape-town-ms-dev-user-group/events/
I received so many questions on how to get started. I suggest getting the off the shelf kit I mentioned in the talk that I started with. It contains everything you need to grow your first plants. This is also an indoor grower, so you can start with growing from seeds indoor and not worry about weather and protecting the electronics against sun and water. It will also make your home office a lot prettier. 😊
What’s in the kit
Arduino
4 x Solenoids (for 4 plants)
4 x Relays
4 Moisture Sensors
1 Pump
Silicon Piping
The kit is great to learn with as it’s not a “black box” watering system. It’s an arduino where Elecrow provides the source code to flash onto the arduino. It works out of the box, but it also allows you to learn from it and also make changes.
Please don’t start by hacking it like I did. I decided it should to be connected to Azure IoT. That’s definitely not needed especially when starting out. But the instructions are there if you want to do that too. 😊
For the beginner this is great and as you could see in the talk, once plants start multiplying, you are forced to scale from there. 😁
