Applied Technology Lab – Telegram
Applied Technology Lab
265 subscribers
140 photos
5 videos
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Knowledge is power, but only if you apply it. DIY projects to improve your life.
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Check out our YouTube channel, we have some opensource projects there from the last couple of years, but we're sort of rebooting the channel...

https://youtube.com/c/AppliedTechnologyLab
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We all have garden and kitchen waste that could make good compost for gardening and growing our own food.

If you have room for a garbage can, you have room to make your own compost. It's as simple as drilling holes in it for ventilation and mixing it up with a shovel.

If you want to get fancy and have room for it, you can make a tumbler like this. There are also commercial tumblers but this caster wheel system is a fraction of the price and allows for multiple barrels to be tumbled with just a single system.

https://youtu.be/V7aw4Oqcc0o
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even in the best of times it's great to save money & be as vertically integrated as possible. With inflation rising everywhere - your personal garden or egg-laying chickens will benefit from creating cycles using very little input.

Duckweed is easy to grow, grows very quickly, keeps your outdoor fish happy and healthy by cleaning the water, and is an excellent source of food for your chickens!

A free source of food to help cut back on what you need to buy is a win-win no matter what's going on.

https://youtu.be/thEwFZYVa7M
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One way to fight inflation is to grow, harvest, make, or build daily necessities rather than buy them at rising prices. We have only 4 hens, but more eggs than we can even use. Feeding them vegetables we grow helps sidestep rising feed prices as well...
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Chickens: CHECK
Compost: CHECK
Something to use the compost for? ....

The next part of our urban farm is the container garden - HDPE barrels that are cheap and easy to find make a durable, sizable container for growing just about anything in it. We show you how to prep the containers for use...

https://youtu.be/bpLv-n9BS0E
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As our solar panels rest, the lights in the coop work overnight, allowing our chickens to eat when as much as they want, rest when they want, and keeps insects like mosquitoes away...
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This is going to be at least half a meter long, a thermometer for testing the temp inside our 200L compost barrels....

We're designing it in SketchUp for 3D printing, and also laying out the electronics inside...
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Top: new compost from our chicken coop and other organic material. Bottom: 1 month using hot composting in our tumbler system.

Note the major difference in not just color but texture. Hot composting and tumblers really work!
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The 3D printed case for our compost barrel thermometer (to track the "hot composting" process) is done and everything fits! Hope to have this all up and operating before the end of the week!
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Our new 3D printed compost thermometer at work. It eventually reached 46 degrees Celsius, quite hot but not hot enough.

With this thermometer we can work on ways to improve the composting process and also possibly automate data logging or ever a process such as adding moisture or perhaps automatically turning the barrels.
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Midnight solar repair. A 'visitor' (a giant monitor lizard) regularly tramples our solar panels which are mounted on a brick wall near our chicken coop.

The solar panels charge lights that light up the coop at night.
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Here is recent make of one of our free 3D printing projects, a replica of an Edo period Japanese lantern which you can find here:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2353657
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Starting seeds for our container garden from small Japanese tomatoes we got at the store. Wasn't sure they'd grow. But here they are!
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