Of the five chilli plants I own the two biggest guys have now outgrown their 6″ pots. I have decided to bite the bullet and upgrade both of these guys to 13″ pots.
A conversation I had with a colleague he suggested that plants have what appears to be echo sounders. In this way they will [...]

After initial delays because of receiving a faulty unit.
My 4 Port USB extender has now arrived !
These devices are a godsend if you want to place USB devices more than (the official) 5 metres away from the PC. The solution consists of two parts :
1. A receiver which plugs into the PC
2. A transmitter [...]

Whilst away working in the Midlands I was introduced to my chilli’s plants northern cousins …
And by-gum these guys are monsters ! Each plant is over 14 inches tall which compared to my guys (of which the largest is now finally 4 inches high).
It would appear that the secret of this speedy growth is the [...]

The summer has arrived and unfortunately whilst the plants seem to think this is excellent. It is making life difficult for the web cams. After attempting to do this in software it would appear that the range of bright light is just too much. So an initial first attempt at resolving this problem has been [...]

After a long weekend away I arrived home to see the delivery of my BioGrow and BioBloom.
To cut a long story short I discovered that a work colleague of mine has been growing chilli’s for some time. The secret to his success is the feed he uses. Bio-Grow and Bio-Bloom. So I just had to [...]

These are pictures of the rest of the plants at the front of the house.

As a result of humidity mk2 there is insufficient room in the outside planter. So I thought it might be an idea to bring one of the plants in doors. In this way I can observe the differences and see if one improves over the other. For this reason my laptop webcam has been deployed [...]

Mk1 of the humidity solution has failed … or more specifically sprung a leak.
Having located an alternative planter that doesn’t have any holes in plants were moved.

Just a very brief update to advise that I have purchased and built a VELLEMAN USB I/O controller board.
After nearly 20 years I can still solder !!
The board is attached to a linux box running Ubuntu and I downloaded and built the drivers.Two files are needed to get up and running:
libusb-0.1.12.tar.gz
libk8055.tar.gz
Instructions
1. Unpack libusb into a [...]

After yet more reading up on what makes a chilli plant happy. I noted that as they normally frequent hot countries they like humid environments.
To achieve this there are a number of recommendations:
1. Only water the plants with luke warm tap water.
2. Add stones to the saucer the plant pot is standing in. In this [...]