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.

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.

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.