re:farm the city

last day. final day. full day. dancing day:)

we got it!! :D we have one board working 99% uéééé
after some problems on the toxic-process-of-making-a-board we finally had 2 boards to start seed with electronics. I’ve started earlier on the soldering job and then miguel showed up a little after and start to solder on the second board, at the end of the day only miguel’s board survive the physical-torture-debug process.. millions of details that come up plus errors on the design and some powdering mysteries that are always presents on the prototypes:p but step by step, error after error we built the voltage regulator part: check, the blinking led of the ATmega: check, the pump controlled by code: check, the humidity sensors: partially check (we have 5 of 6 working>mystery #234) and the xbee module check and sending data to my computer:) so tomorrow let’s assemble all together, define the final location of the plants and upload some code.

today was also the guerrilla day:) and refarm the city, jpe-asturias.org, zoohaus.net and a lot of people went to xixón by bike and demand the last word for abandoned places or stupid corners:p

following the tradition @ refarm we’ve made a local gastronomy farm: “potaxe asturianu” (brassica oleracea, solanum tuberosum, phaseolus)

and one aromatic farm (laurus nobilis l., rosmarinus officinalis, petroselium crispum)

have a look on flickr for more photos

one of the ideas of summerLAB is that you work on what you want and is the group that makes the plan. our group decided start from the beginning:) during these days we are going to produce a lot of organic “trash” and to take advantage of this we built a compost. tomorrow we are going to hunt for trash, urban trash: water pumps from cars, computer power supply, water reservoirs, local supplies of organic trash, electric cables, batteries and whatever more we find interesting:p

this is a blog about process so in the next few days I’ll post the development of re:farm here in asturias. we will try to have some tools for city farmers ready to DIY. we also plan to make some farms based on local gastronomy (it seems that broads bean are quite popular here) stay in touch for the next harvest ;)

this is our plan: built this tools :p

thanks nature our farms are growing, and they will stay like this during the summer. since nature is doing her job we will go and make other stuff also important for a decent urban farm: DIY refarm-electronic-low-budget-tool-kits :D

hangar.org and LABoral.org are co-producing this big-tech-camp-event just in the middle of asturias. a week of hacking, testing and have fun for all the family or as they say: “El SummerLAB es un evento participativo que se organiza con la colaboración de todxs aquellxs que quieran compartir sus conocimientos y habilidades relacionadas con la creación audiovisual y arte interactivo para potenciar la interconectividad de la escena digital española.”

from 2nd to 7th of august you will have a place to camp, big nature just at your side, and a lot of technofrikis around those days:p there are a plenty of activities planned (check on their blog) and re:farm was invited to make 1 of them. we are gonna built a low budget watering system and a data visualizer of temperature and humidity. so, get your phone and call them write now. no phone? ask by email, snail mail, fax, make a tattoo, send a message in a bottle, do whatever you need to get your place… the re:farm workshops are limited to a small amount of humans…

just in case you can’t go.. cool, we will post the process on this blog and you can always be part of the online group.

c u @ summerLAB

do you know how to make a swedish artsoap? better yep, do you know what do you need to plant? here you have it :D

last sunday was the Wanås opening and re:farm the city made some farming over there. check out our flirck account to see the other 3 farms that we’ve created and some other pictures of the amazing wanås landscape. I would like to thanks annika soderberg for the invitation of course but also for her big commitment on creating a more sustainable planet. we’ll keep posting the evolution of wanås farm and will keep one eye on the allotment plot project.