Recent bad weather discouraged outdoor activity. So I used my time indoors to tackle a BJC.3 (Beauty and Joy of Computing – Berkeley, CA) project. We were recently instructed on web scraping which means using Snap! (a block programming language derived from Scratch) to go to the internet and scrape selected data from websites.
From Spring to Fall a daily decision is whether to water my crops and, if so, how much. To make this analysis I need to know current soil moisture, expected precipitation (rainfall) in the next 12 hours and local average temperature. If there is sufficient moisture in the ground or rain is imminent then it is not necessary to irrigate. The need for irrigation is increased if temperatures are high since this will accelerate evaporation and unnecessary if temperatures are low. At some point I will install sensors which will report ground conditions. In the meantime I had some fun and devised my “Irrigation Adviser”. Click on the following link and you can see the message given me on 2/16/2016 @ 2.10pm.