First results on optimizing battery life for the compost sensor: This chart measures the voltage of the battery over time. The first steeper slope is a baseline, with a simple CPU delay() called during the loop(). The second shallower slope is calling sleep() from the LowPower Arduino library. Not as much improvement as I expected, so I'll try deepSleep() next.

First compost sensor assembled.

I grew about two dozen of these feijoa (pineapple guava) from seed about five years ago. This is the first flower I've seen on any of them.

running flux1-dev on Forge #stablediffusion

I don't understand why everyone is getting upset about the Olympics, censorship, immigration and all the other rage narratives. Dealing with health insurance in the US should be enough for us to have already burned every single government building to the ground.

Finished testing the battery on my compost sensor. An 18650 cell (2200 mAh) lasted 3 days when sampling every 15 seconds. This should be more than enough when sampling every 5 minutes for a ~2 week hot compost cycle. #compost #arduino #homeassistant

Hmm, reconnecting to wifi automatically. Probably a good idea.

I added support for multiple sensors to my compost sensor project. (60C and 992 are the dynamically generated unique IDs for each sensor) All it took was a weekend of hacking and a PR for the arduino-home-assistant library. But now I can add as many sensors as I want with having to hardcode or update anything on the base station. Just upload the TX sketch onto a new board and go.

GitHub

GitHub - zappityzap/compost-sensor: Arduino-based compost sensor, integrated with Home Assistant.

Arduino-based compost sensor, integrated with Home Assistant. - zappityzap/compost-sensor

#homeassistant #arduino

Initial testing of the soil moisture sensor is underway, after a few stumbles. This the raw sensor output, divided by 10. In the air it reads about 32, and submerged in water it's 101. This test shows the sensor in some almost-dry potting soil followed by a watering.

Some big news in AI image generation today. Most of the members of the image and video team from Stability AI launched a new company called Black Forest and a new model called Flux. Early results look very good. Currently requires 24 GB VRAM, but should be optimized by the community soon. ComfyUI has support already. Their site has a teaser of the upcoming text-to-video model, but it's currently being hugged to death.

GitHub

GitHub - black-forest-labs/flux: Official inference repo for FLUX.1 models

Official inference repo for FLUX.1 models. Contribute to black-forest-labs/flux development by creating an account on GitHub.

https://blackforestlabs.ai/up-next/ JoyCaption is a free, open and uncensored VLM built from the ground up. Existing tools are expensive or don't perform well for some domains. Great results for a pre-Alpha. This tool will be extermely useful to enable more community fine-tuning and training because producing captions for datasets is very time-consuming. https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1egwgfk/joycaption_free_open_uncensored_vlm_early/ #stablediffusion

Why don't you have a self-hosted LLM yet? 8 GB is enough to run llama3 8b, and larger models work, just slower. ollama with open-webui seems good so far.

GitHub

GitHub - ollama/ollama: Get up and running with OpenAI gpt-oss, DeepSeek-R1, Gemma 3 and other models.

Get up and running with OpenAI gpt-oss, DeepSeek-R1, Gemma 3 and other models. - ollama/ollama

GitHub

GitHub - open-webui/open-webui: User-friendly AI Interface (Supports Ollama, OpenAI API, ...)

User-friendly AI Interface (Supports Ollama, OpenAI API, ...) - open-webui/open-webui

Added a soil moisture sensor to my compost sensor platform. Temperature measurement is the priority, but this capacitive moisture sensor might be useful to watch for the outside of the pile drying out. It also includes an air temperature sensor that should provide some insight into how the piles perform in different seasons. #compost #arduino #homeassistant #grownostr

How do I run ostrich-70 in ollama? What are the different versions of each quantization?

Compost sensor progress: Home Assistant integration! #homeassistant #compost

I changed my ChatGPT system prompt to talk like a pirate a few days ago. I have no regrets.