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Sure I'll go. I grow vanilla as a side project to many other things. I've done some controlled backyard experiments with replication between my vineyard and another in my community to look at the impact of temperature on growth rates.
We plan on publishing but I've got enough day job publications going at once right now that a hobby paper is something I have a hard time justifying the time for, but the data is done and collected. We just used one and paper.
Sorry if this seems strange, but do you do data analysis? If not, I’d be happy to explore and visualize the data! It’s always interesting to me to do it.
Yep. 15 years in the trade. I even put together some cute python code to make bar plots where the bars were in the pattern of Vanilla vines with leaves in them. I just literally do not have the time to get back into it because I'm either writing or analyzing on 5 other papers at once and I've got two teams of analysts on other projects that I have to provide leadership for. It's just not something I can justify spending my free time on.
It's important to me that my hobbies don't become burdensome so I'm more than happy to just let it sit for a time where I have a couple free cycles to write it up and publish. Well probably just get it out as a note in a local ag journal. We took the data with the intention of building a growing degree day model for Vanilla.
This was years ago now; I did an experiment to test various AA battery chemistries in real-world conditions to determine if the price difference was worth it. This was tangentially related to amateur radio, I first got the idea from overhearing a conversation on 2 meters.
I used rechargeable Ni-MH, zinc oxide "Heavy Duty" batteries, alkalines, and lithiums to play a lot of video games on my Nintendo Wii. (the batteries in the controller) I found that the Lithum batteries performed less than twice as long as the alkaline batteries, nowhere near worth their price. The "Heavy Duty" batteries were less than half of the alkalines but that actually made them more cost effective. The Ni-MH batteries had the shortest single charge of them all, I forget what it worked out to be the break even point.
One thing I did note was the Lithium batteries were noticeably lighter than the Alkalines, so if weight is an issue they may be a viable option.
Thank you.
I've used phyphox for lots of stuff. It's great for looking at raw data from your phone's sensors but there are also a lot of great experiments built in to the app. The university that develops it has a playlist showcasing them all, it's a great way to spend a weekend.
This is a really interesting thread, OP - well done, and thanks for the app recommendation
Thank you.
Are there any apps that you'd like to recommend?
Obtainium, for installing phyphox directly from GitHub. 😉
I track lots of things, all the time; my body composition, performance at specific tasks... As for experiments, I've done a few:
Elaborate on the ultrasound please
Of course!
I wanted to test whether a cheap piezo buzzer could be used as a crude ultrasound probe. It worked, so I tried to upgrade it into full-blown ultrasound imaging. The third iteration of that did produce an image, using a piezo buzzer cut in sections, a cheap FPGA, a MCU, custom PCB and mostly 3D printed pieces (acoustic lens, etc.). Aside from the expected low resolution, turned out that it wouldn't image anything beyond about 1 cm.
I did make a fourth iteration of the device, much smaller and theoretically much better. But life happened and I never finished the coding part.
congrats on the excellent project.
how many pieces of the piezo and which frequency of operation did you use?
how did you design/source the acoustic lens design?
seriously well done!!
Thank you! :)
I managed to get 4 piezo elements to work, limited by the FPGA. This was actually enough for some reasonable horizontal resolution since I used a phase array configuration, so the downside was the electronics had to generate very precisely timed pulses. The fourth prototype had 10 working elements thanks to replacing the MCU-FPGA duo with just a more powerful FPGA and using conductive glue to more reliably connect the elements themselves.
It was configurable to use any even divisor of 120 MHz, but in practice anything over 1 MHz would not even make it out of the acoustic lens due to the low voltage and low quality impedance matching layer. And much lower frequencies are barely useful anyways, so the true working range was narrow.
For the acoustic lens, I used the parametric design software OpenSCAD, with an equation for aberration-free lenses I had found somewhere and saved long before (will find it if you want) and the speed of sound in the different materials.
A DIY superficial USG could be super useful for emergency lung imaging in low resource centers, if you ever want to keep that project up! Check out BLUE protocol by Lichtenstein et al
I fully intend to go on with the project! Right now it's not good enough to be interesting, but the results so far are too promising to not give it a chance.
Cool.
Did you notice any trends from your tracking?
Things that others may also be find useful/intetesting?
Well, one thing I've noticed in most measures that involve mental things (mood, performance...) is that lots of things seem to be cyclical. For example, mood is often alternating (more so in my case), but productivity and burnout also tend to repeat predictably as long as the routine doesn't change.
Also, I'm maximally performant in tasks when most stable (good sleep, moderate mood, medication, no drugs...), but maximally productive when in a better mood.
I enjoyed using phyphox while on a plane recently. I found it fun to track the pressure and to see how it loosely corresponded to my own subjective experience of ascending vs descending.
I can't recall any "useful" things I've used the app for, but I really enjoy having it — it makes me feel powerful. Like, it's nice to think that if I did have some ideas of experiments to run, I could. It feels fitting to be able to access the sensors, because there are many ways in which our electronic devices nowadays aren't (or don't feel like) our own, so this feels like a small amount of clawing back power, even if I'm not using it for much.
I checked out phyphox and it's so cool. Gonna show this to my wife who is a high school science teacher. Young students love running experiments like these. When you give a curious mind a tool to measure the world with, and set them loose, good things happen. Thanks!
I build an off-grid solar power set on my back yard and tracked it's results for two years. It was only 500W in 3 directions (east, south and west)
It first charged the batteries and then used the rest to heat water if no direct use was present.
Learned a lot and noticed that many ideas and mental images about it were bullshit. Still usefull if applied to right applications.
Not gonna buy a bigger set and will use the existing ones to just heat water till they give up.
Care to elaborate on the bullshit?
Thank you.
Learned a lot and noticed that many ideas and mental images about it were bullshit.
What were the main ones?
Some relatives of mine have been thinking about rooftop solar and had talked about it to me too. Didn't comment much, other than generic talking points of warranty, on whether is on or off-grid etc.
Not sure if my "notes" apply unless we share similarities in geographic and market.
Backgroud:
Salesmen that have come to my door to sell panel sets use annual average energy price and even that has been exaggerated. It totally ignores that you will be producing most when energy price is lowest. Their sales pitch calculations are designed to be hard to follow and then they rub the wonderous estimates in your face. You can't base a reclamation on unrealized results.
People who say that they have saved a ton of money with panels are usually those who have had fixed value pricing and totally ignore the fact that they would have saved most of it during summer time having energy market based pricing, which they now need to have in order to sell their solar juice to the grid and later buy it back. They of course suffer during the winter, but ignore that because that "has nothing to do with panels" (because it's dark and panels are covered in snow.
If I'd been connected to the grid, counter-intuitively the panels facing West would the most usefull, not the ones facing South, because they were active when I used the most. In our market the more you can use your own production the better and this high North sun is still somewhat usefull late in the evening.
If off-grid, lithum based batteries seem to be the only viable option. They are however a fire hazard. Up here if you store them outside, you need to insulate the space and keep it above freezing from December to March and that takes energy, when it's most expensive. You can dismantle your battery setup and store them unconnected more safely indoors, but that is not for the layman.
This is becoming too long I'll add more later
Thank you
I keep track of prices in cost per kg (or liter) so I am not fooled by shrinkflation and so that I know when a good sale is, without having to remember all prices. Basically just have a giant spreadsheet with the numbers.
Cool.
If possible, could you share your inferences from it?
Like how the prices of products are connected or which product is affected most/least?
I don't really run analysis on the numbers. I just use them when I'm shopping to see if a price is good or not.
I have noticed that at least here in Denmark, it never makes sense to buy butter if it's not on sale, and some sales are still priced badly.
Probably not the answer you are looking for, but I run a ton of math on gaming. Doninos, Warhammer, Magic the Gathering exct. I used to play in a lot of tournaments. Not professional, I do not want that stress. But, I usually placed top 4.
A fun experiment I did recently was to measure the speed of sound with my oscilloscope. I wired up a speaker and a microphone at a known distance from each other, connected the oscilloscope to both sides and measured how long it took between sound trigger & reception. I came within several meters/second accuracy which I think is a nice result for a basic home lab setup.
I also track a lot of metrics around the house using Home Assistant. Temperature, humidity, power usage, light levels, heating, but also stuff like total meters of filament used, total objects printed, system metrics. I like statistics and it's fun to compare months/years and clearly see the results of improved isolation for example.
Cool.
Did you notice any thing that'd useful/interesting for others? Or anything that you think others should start to track too?
For the average household I think tracking your energy and gas consumption is most useful as it allows you to spot accidental wasteful usage and both save money and the environment :)
Indeed. Thank you.
I experiment with everything all the time. Try new approaches to things, see what worked and didn’t, adjust and try again. Cooking, exercise, social interactions, lovemaking, if I can evaluate it I run little informal experiments on it all the time.
Best quantitative example is exercise. I track lots of cardio metrics with my gps+HR watch so I can see in real time what I am doing to my pace vs heart rate. I track my estimated 1RM for various lifts across different training programs and methodologies and have found one that produces the best results for me. My watch also tracks sleep and I’ve found that 2 drinks affects my sleep while 3 drinks wrecks my sleep.
I do experiments mostly on my computer/phone but once I had a small digital clock that was powered by 2 cups of cola. it had a battery that generates a tiny amount of electricity from chemical reactions, and the cola was used as an electrolyte. then I connected some wires and it worked. pretty epic.
I often do experiments involving randomness, art, math, NLP, cryptography and programming.
In my most recent experiment as from yesterday, I created a novel ciphering method. I mean, I guess it's totally different from known ciphering methods (such as Vigenere, Caesar, Playfair, ROT13 and so on) because I couldn't find anything similar.
Some examples follow:
((1,8,8), (6,6,5), (5,4), ø, ø, (1,2), (0,0), ø, (2,1), ø) (in the way I'm using it for now, the cipher will always result in 10 tuples containing a variable amount of tuples, with ø indicating an empty tuple; there are lots of output formatting alternatives: here I’m using an one-liner mathematical representation in order to be compact).((0,1,5), (1,9,1,1,2,3,3), (0,5), (1,2), ø, (1), ø, ø, ø, (1))((0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,1,2), (0,0,1,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,2), (0,1,0,1,2,2,3,4,5,6), (0,1,2), (0,1,2), (0,1,2), (0,1), (0,1), (0,1), (1,2))((0,1,1,1), (0,0), ø, ø, ø, ø, ø, ø, ø, ø)I'll keep a puzzle spirit and I won't explain it for now. The only hint is that the previous examples consider the English alphabet as so: A=01, B=02, C=03, all the way until Z=26 (yeah, the leading zero matters to this ciphering method). If you're a programmer, think in terms of pointers, or even better, an unidirectional linked list. If you're a mathematician, try to visualize a graph.
The cipher doesn't rely just on its principles, it also needs a corresponding mapping set (which can be alphabetical but can also contain non-letters, even emojis or hieroglyphs; the order will matter), and it also needs to know where to start the traversal path (the given examples start at the zeroeth tuple, but it could start anywhere). It's both deterministic (because there's a single correct path) and chaotic (because the result depends on other variables such as the mapping set, the initial position to start traversing, which element to take (whether the first or the last, FIFO or LIFO) and what numeric base to use (the examples used base-10, but it can be done as hexadecimal, octal, binary, or virtually any numerical base)). So I guess it has a lot of potential, not just for cryptography.
Nothing serious, but I track all the games I play. According to stats, I completed 30 games and spent a total of 4d 15h 32m playing games this year.
Espresso. Track water volume, mineral levels, coffee weights, temp, pressure, and taste profile.
I hate coffee. But it's fun.