Gary Mack – Mack Family Ranch (MFR)

18 August, 201917 April, 2021

Big Progress in Green House

Today I was able to assemble all 4 of the aquaponic grow tubs. They are all now hooked up to the pump system, and have auto siphon valves that work, and have grow pots in them. I’ve been running my initial Arduino program to control things and so far so good; things are working as planned!

The above image shows the grow tubs and the Arduino set up that will control a bunch of things in the green house.

There are two Arduinos installed right now. One is monitoring various sensors (humidity, temperature, light, etc) in the green house and then logging the info to a database I have in the cabin (wireless connection to my network). The other is controlling the pump and watering valves.

11 August, 201921 February, 2021

It’s All Happening At The Zoo…

Had a great California trip to visit with Ellie. Rich and Melissa let Laura and me take her for the day so we walked around old town Folsom and went to the Folsom Zoo. We were able to see tigers, cougars, bears, monkeys, and a whole lot more…

13 February, 201921 February, 2021

The Drive Home…

I live about 3.5 miles down this “road”. It’s a fun drive most of the time, takes about 15-20 minutes depending on the conditions.

13 February, 201911 August, 2019

Oops…Guess You Can Get Out Of Control…

So, was plowing after the last big storm we had and things went a little out of control. Pushing a lot of snow with the loader unload the weight of the front tires and my little red tractor decided to go where she wanted to, or where gravity and physics decided to take her anyway.

1 February, 201921 February, 2021

A nice view of the cabin, from this fall, before the snows came rolling in…

Been working diligently over the last few months and now have a greenhouse built out and the “patio” area all graveled. Lot of work but it’s getting more and more “done” each day…

31 January, 201918 August, 2019

Hello Highlanders!

I now have a Raspberry Pi 3B+ up and running with WordPress, Apache2, MySQL,
Python, and PHP installed and apparently working just fine. And this site is proof as it’s running on that itty bitty $40 Raspberry Pi…

This little computer is only 3.4 inches by 2.2 inches; pretty amazing when you think of all the things it can do! And it runs off of a 5 volt power source, same as your cell phone charger…just plug in a micro usb cable and away you go (if you know Linux and can code a little).

Continue reading “Hello Highlanders!”