Designing Software for Things That Rot

That's so great about sourdough starter, you don't have to babysit it at all. We'll, that is, once I figured out that I should ignore the "hydration hydration hydration" and "add blah percentage water and 1.618034 grams of flour" advice. Instead, I just add lots (yes, that's a measure, like pinch and scoop) of fresh flour to my starter and just add water until it's a gooey sticky mess. Leave it alone and it'll do its thing.

Given that my grandfather used to cure his own in a cabinet in his root cellar with NO automation it feels a little overkilly but I'm glad to see someone else is overkilling at an even more extreme level than me and is making their work public.

Two float switches, a latching relay, a cold water line, a valve, and a valve actuator can automate reservoir filling. An HOA switch and leak detection would be nice additions to the automatic reservoir filling, low and high water alarms too. That’s how a boiler feedwater tank works. Might be tricky to fit the float switches in a small humidifier tank, though.

It’s a bit more work to set up than temp and humidity sensing/control but you might as well automate it all once you start.

I appreciate the restraint. :P Besides, embedding a lie into a ledger doesn't make it true, it just makes it slightly harder to escape accountability that might not exist anyway.

> "Slightly more sour than batch #3" beats pH to three decimals.

Yeah, while the "human tongue" sensor and support package might not be standardized, it's still far more powerful than anything we can build in a factory.

We just need to control for cases where its processing-unit automatically incorporates data we want to exclude, like "how expensive was that sample."

I found a really nice modular architecture in esp32 flashed with tasmota for all of the sensors and switching, they would talk via MQTT over Wi-Fi to a raspberry pi running node-red. It was responsible for all of the data integration, flows, process automation and dashboards.

Just made it super easy to add/remove features without rewiring things and allowed me to replace the esp32’s very easily.

Off-topic, but the syntax highlighting is a little difficult to read on light mode: https://pasteboard.co/5dXcQjgcHIqu.png

Apparently when you're in the bulk business, selling water is a good business, but if you lose x% of your water in your corn you're out an equivalent portion of your revenue.

If the corn goes moldy, you may be out more. Hence the optimization.