Monthly Archives: August 2013

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My Silly Pondcam – Post 11

As usual I am up late and I worked on this as soon as I got everything work and domestic taken care of. Again I had to check where we were with the last post to make sure I knew where to begin. OK.. I remember. Our camera totally works, I got it working way on the other side of the pond which is a couple of hundred feet away. I think we are good on connectivity with our new antennas. I got a call from a customer this morning nice and early that had a problem with his PC. So I helped a bit over the phone and then realized I really needed to go there. But before leaving I did check to see if our pondcam was alive in the low light of an overcast morning.

1-no-ping

Nope… It is still totally dead. It is pretty light outside, but definitely cloudy, and there is no sun in sight. I don’t really have any time in the morning because lots of people need me to work on things, so I take care of all of that first.

I go to the customer site and take care of the PC issue. When I get home it is still pretty early, but I have lots to do. I have to make a plan for an email migration and fix a dead website and in between I do a server restore. During one of those (I am not sure which one), I see this on my monitor (The time was 1:42PM).

2-ping-live-at-1-42pm

That is weird, I thought. I look outside my office window (Which, again,  is really far from the pond). And what do I see? Sun breaking through the clouds. I immediately stopped what I was doing and connected to the camera.

3-camera-live-yay

That is a picture from the camera, that is looking over the beach at the pond. This puts me in a really good mood and I am reenergized about what to do next. I still had a lot of work to do, so I continued doing things that are important instead of silly for the next few hours.

All of those important things kept me busy until much later. I wasn’t able to do anything until about 6:45PM. But once I was done with everything, I couldn’t help myself. I had to do something for the pondcam. We know the solar panels can power up the camera and charge the batteries. I didn’t have to do anything, I was just sitting there working and then woink!… the camera came up all by itself. This gives me hope that this plan will actually work.

Now it is overcast and our battery definitely isn’t charged for any serious work, but we still have some problems to tackle. Do you remember this picture?

22-camera-in-pond

Well if you don’t remember it, I sure do. That won’t work at all. I almost didn’t post that because it is so stupid looking. I can just imagine some dope on the Internet saying something like “You stupid idiot, you need to suspend that camera from something that floats, just build a dock for it and you will have something that is pretty to show people instead of embarrassing yourself and your family name”.

Unlike the imaginary coyotes in my brain from post 10 that aren’t very smart and would just tear me to pieces, the imaginary troll in my brain has a good point. I will build a dock for my pondcam. A dock would be perfect. It will solve these issues:

1) The level of my pond follows the water table. This is really neat for the pond, but bad for the pondcam. If I put it out there and we have one of the many “100 year” storms we have been having every other year, it is game over, everything is under water. Instead of marching around my yard taking pictures of how cool all of the flooding is, I will be taking care of and messing around with the pondcam. I know it seems strange right now to anyone who has been following this post, but in the end, I want to look at what is going on in my pond from my desk. I don’t want to have to go out and change batteries, move crap around and walk in mud to see what is going on in my pond. I want pondcam to be its own autonomous little system that comes up and turns on when it is sunny, then kind of waddles down at night and goes to sleep because the battery that charges it runs out of juice and dies. It may not be 24×7 pondcam like I was hoping, but that is OK with me.

2) I can’t forget about my kids and all of the other kids that like to hang out here. If it can be messed with, one of them will. I think instead of plowing a big path through the tall grass with my “manual weed whacker”, I will instead strategically place the dock behind some of the grass and only clear enough room for me to set everything up. Then just leave the dock sit there naturally floating on the water and keeping our pondcam in a safe place where the kids won’t notice it.

3) The last thing is more for my personal entertainment. I love docks. When I was little we used to jump off of them into the a lake. These were really good memories for me. I want to build a small one, so I can figure out a clever way to build  a big one that I can jump off of into my pond someday.

So, with all of that stuff being said. It is late… I really don’t want to go to the hardware store and get wood or anything else. Let’s see what I have in my basement to make a dock for our pondcam.

All of the docks that I have been on are made out of wood. I do have some of that. Check this out.

4-some-wood

I can probably turn some of that into a dock for our pondcam tonight if I get to it. But first I have a problem. I have to figure out how to make the floats underneath the dock. I don’t have any Styrofoam like they use on the docks that I jumped off of when I was a kid. I need something that floats. I have an idea…. It is a little bit of a longshot, but I think it will work with some really basic planning and calculation. My family consumes a LOT of bottled water. And I have a bunch of these.

5-empty-water-bottle

I can use these for our dock.

I have to work really quickly if I want to get some sleep (There will be painting involved and it needs to dry). I grab my saw horses and set them up and pull the big fiberboard sheet out and place it on top. I stick the base of the antenna and camera right on it and start taking measurements.

6-measuring-camera

Now remember I am going to have to put that camera under the water. So I need to make a hole that lets light through the top where the camera is focusing. So I am sure to measure out a place where the camera can be lowered into the water.

What about our solar panels? We need a place for them too on our dock. I place them on the board and take some quick measurements.

8-solar-on-dock

Oh… I like this picture. The solar panels are reflecting an American flag that is hanging on my wall. That is neat. But let’s not get too distracted. We still have to make our dock. So I;

– Saw.
– Drill.
– Saw some more.
– Swear a little bit when the saw horses fell and had the whole dock crash to the ground partially finished (the girls didn’t hear me).
– Saw some more.
– measure some more.
– Run out of neat 1×4 easy to work with wood and have to make the last piece from another piece of wood.
–  Then drill in a handful of deck screws.
– OK our dock is pretty close to ready.

10-dock-ready-for-painting

I like it. Unlike pondcam in clear plastic that is kind of pretty in a “form follows function” sort of way. Let’s get our camera base on this thing and see how it looks.

11-camera-on-unpainted-dock

Let’s look at where the solar panels will sit.

12-solar-panels-on-dock

That looks pretty good. Let’s see how those water bottle floaters will sit on the bottom.

13-waterbottle-on-bottom

That looks pretty good. This sucker is going to need a couple of coats of porch paint. I just know the edges of that wood are going to be sitting in the water. Lucky I have some left.

– Paint one coat on top.
– Setup fan so it dries faster.
– Clean brush.
– Work on my wife’s computer while I wait for it to dry.
– Paint another coat on top.
– Clean brush.
– Work on my wife’s computer while the paint dries.
Blah, blah, blah…  Now we have this….

14-dock-bottom

OK… That has to dry…. What can I do now? Oh… I know… I have to figure out how to attach our empty water bottles to the dock. I do have an almost full tub of this.

15-sheet-flooring-adhesive

That looks a lot like a big tub of glue to me. I think I will use that.

When I lifted up the dock after it was all put together, I imagined bringing it out to the pond. That would be a pain. It needs handles. What can I do for handles? Well… I do have some of this.

16-handles-on-dock

I will just drill some holes in the side of our dock, insert a short bit of this rope at four places so it is super easy to carry. Here is a picture of it being figured out.

17-rope-handles

OK… I did two coats on each side  with porch paint (Top and bottom). We are totally out of porch paint, so if I need to treat any wood at all in the future, I am going to have to find something to use.

18-empty-paint

I setup a fan to make it dry as fast as possible. This is what is drying overnight.

19-almost-finished-dock

OK.. It is late and it is also supposed to be sunny tomorrow. I must state that I did put our battery back on the “charger to charge batteries that go into a car” tonight (Instead of using sunlight from our solar panels, which I wanted to do). I don’t want to have to wait until it is sunny to show some pictures underwater, if I get there. I took a picture of it connected to the charger, but I can’t find it.

Crap… It is 2:07AM. I have to go to bed!

——-

I can’t remember if it was yesterday that I finished writing the above or the day before. For some reason I thought I got to bed at 1AM last night, I think I was wrong.

The first thing I did tonight after getting back from work was to take out the garbage. I know what you are thinking, “why are you telling me this?” It is important because that is where all of our empty water bottles are. I scrounge and scrounge, but all I could come up with is this.

20-water-bottles

We aren’t even close. From the angle it looks like we are closer than we really are, but that is really only a quarter filled. I am going to have to drink a lot more water or find another way to get empty water bottles. Or perhaps find a different way to make it float. I suppose I could just screw a plywood bottom on it and waterproof that, but I just know that would sink eventually. I think I am going to stick with the water bottle idea.

I can’t do anything about our lack of bottles, so I finish putting all of the handles on the dock.

21-handles-installed

And I drilled a few holes to secure our antenna and solar panels to the dock. You know what would happen if I didn’t do that right? The first windy day, it would knock everything into the water. And I would probably be too busy to notice and won’t find it for a few days. Better to be safe than sorry.

22-buttlerfly-nut

Well, that is all I can to tonight. I can’t think of anything else. I am really happy with the dock so far. I thought this was going to be an eyesore and when people come over they would look at it and say “what is that weird looking thing?”. Now I think they might say, “What is that cool looking antenna over there on that dock?”.

I do have to solve this bottle shortage problem though. It will take my little family weeks to drink that much bottled water.

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