It would be great to see...

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Permalink Reply by Eduardo Montanez on June 14, 2009 at 9:43pm

I would like to see the Tower System on wheels (literally), how about a pair of motor controlled peripheral boards plugged into the functional elevator expansion ports!! Set in the vertical position they can drive the wheels. Solar powered?

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Permalink Reply by GeekTastic on June 19, 2009 at 10:12pm

Yep, I heard a lot of geeks talking about adding a motor control module to the Tower System. WiFi on top, battery back in the middle and wheels on the bottom. BAM! You have a internet enabled WiFi Tower Mobile!

...who's up to the challenge?

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Permalink Reply by Megan Hansen on June 15, 2009 at 8:46am

What a cool idea!

TowerMaster said:

I would like to see the Tower System on wheels (literally), how about a pair of motor controlled peripheral boards plugged into the functional elevator expansion ports!! Set in the vertical position they can drive the wheels. Solar powered?

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Permalink Reply by John Mc on June 16, 2009 at 8:16pm

Shoot...I want a Tower Alarm Clock. Hurry up with that LCD!

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Permalink Reply by Eduardo Montanez on June 22, 2009 at 11:36pm

You know I also want the alarm clock, but I want it with WiFi and graphical LCD to give me live network feed. Think weather, sports, hot shopping deals, etc versus RSS. Oh and instant messaging from tower to tower. All this with a sweet touch screen interface. See attachment for a little teaser on upcoming Tower graphical LCD module. :-)

Think 3.5" QVGA TFT, more specs coming soon!!!! Maybe if I see more ideas or geeks up for the challenge I will leak info.

Attachments:

• DSCF1135ss.JPG, 152 KB

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Permalink Reply by Engine_Ear on June 25, 2009 at 2:07pm

Just off the top of my head, from reading other responses in this thread:

What about a ZigBee module, and a touch screen. Then you could control the lighting in your home from one central location if you wanted. You could use the Ethernet module and host the information so it could be viewed/controlled from anywhere! Maybe even add on other external sensors and you could monitor your sump pump, furnace/AC or tell if a window or door has been opened.

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Permalink Reply by Stanley Ames on June 28, 2009 at 11:12am

That's more along the lines of what we are wnting to do with this. We are putting together control electronics for an automated aeroponics system that we would like to have update a page on our blog with temp, time, humidity, whether the foggers are on, and a webcam picture.

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Permalink Reply by Eduardo Montanez on June 30, 2009 at 12:40am

Nice!! What hardware do you see yourself needing beyond what the Tower has available right now?

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Permalink Reply by Stanley Ames on July 1, 2009 at 4:47pm

We are using some custom stuff to control a 24v AC line that supplies the fogger units. Also, we want to read temperature and humidity both ambient--i.e. at the leaf level--and internal--in the root chamber. The sensors must be water resistant, a bit of spray enamel will do for that.

Boards-wise, nothing that isn't custom for the application. We've been looking at some Digilent boards--they were at the ASEE conference too--that do temp here.

We still have no module to do humidity. If we wanted on system feedback--i.e. a screen--we were thinking of another digilent module for display here. If there was a nice, cheap, display currently available for the Tower we'd consider that too. We aren't very particular. Whatever is cheap and easy.

Our Tower is getting delivered today so we'll see how easy things are.

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Permalink Reply by William Lovell on August 7, 2009 at 1:49pm

Megan,
Neat idea. Battery pack to run the tower with a solar panel to constant charge the battery.

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