Aquaponics - Solids removal

I'm actually a firm subscriber to the idea of leaving all solids in your aquaponics system, but I don't really have anything to inform that decision other than my thinking it. 

So we cant have that.

A healthy system can absorb a lot of fish waste and solids break down in no time. There are worms to help with that in the growbeds, but even without worms, friendly bacteria are always there to do their thing.

There's also the point that removing solids is removing hard earned nutrient from your system that the plants need.

There's also the fact that as my system stands now, I have a nice feeling that I'm working comfortably within natures guidelines and margins for error.

But enough of the sensible reasons for not messing about with solids removal. I'm going to have a go at it.

There are a few experiments from my recent past that I can call on. One is the swirl filter and it's followup, the self cleaning swirl filter. The self cleaning swirl filter was designed to separate solids, but keep them in the system, and I encourage you to click on the "self cleaning" link if you feel you might enjoy watching a video of fish poo swirling and settling. The reason I made it was to gain a source of clean water for my NFT (Nutrient film technique) pipes, but it might prove useful in this current endeavour.

I might also need a bit of electronics.

And an invention engine.

And a bit of a mental shift. I think I need to focus on water removal or recovery rather than solids removal. I need to get the water solids mix dryer and dryer.

Currently my plan looks a bit like this...

Step 1. Split the solids from the majority of the water flow using one of my self cleaning swirl filters. I suspect I'll be able to take out 90% of the water at this stage. It look like I might be able to do this stem more than once to get even more water out.

Step 2. Further separate the solids using gentle flow of the remaining water over or through a mechanical filter. Apparently, this will take the form of a conveyor belt sieve that slowly or perhaps intermittently eases solids from a water bath. At least that's what the invention engine seems to think. 

Step 3. Automatically convey the solids to a worm farm so I can add household veggie scraps and create high protein fish food. By returning the fish waste as fish food, I can still keep a natural eco-loop going, and continue to feel good about my system. Also, the fish really like the worms, and in winter when silver perch go off their pellet feed, it might be a good way to keep them growing.

Two things the final design will need to accomplish are that it will need to be very reliable, and that it will need to be very automated. I'll need to be able to go away for a week and ignore the system, and I'll need to create some failsafe system to make sure that I dont end up overloading the growbeds.

There is a great danger of overloading the system, because in order to have enough nutrient for the plants, I'm going to have to overstock my system with fish if I'm going to remove most of the solid waste.




120 Things in 20 years sees me cautiously optimistic about an automatic, aquaponics, solids removing, worm farm addition to my system.

Thinking - Population density, innovation, and some evolution

I've just spent the last two months testing my invention engine by not using it.

It's the last of it's formal tests that I have in mind.

The test is to see if it really does anything, or if it's just me coming up with ideas that solve the problems.

I for one can see the difference.

Lately my ideas have all been a little thin, impractical, had no sense of direction, and seemed to involve phlegm. That last one may in fact account for all the others, but I've never been one to let reality crush a story.

In Australia, we (white invaders) have this traditional ingrained presupposition that we are all highly skilled in making do. We feel a country wide enthusiasm that makes us believe we can fix stuff, and that everything will be ok, as long as we have a bit of fencing wire. (I suspect north america has the same thing with gaffer tape) The result is we can be left as a wire-bound backwater in the struggle for national identity.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, so bear (forbearance, not the big furry thing you never want to find in your pantry) with me and see what happens.

Birds are dense in the head.

Their brains are packed with a stack of connections. More per cubic whatever than we have by a long shot.

The secret is in needing to be lightweight.

Now I have to mention evolution.

I've been avoiding this for a long time.

Evolution, as we know, is real.

It's a fact.

It happens all the time and is not something relegated to the past. It's something that happens all the time and was going on this morning before breakfast.

Some guy named Darwin came up with a theory called "Natural Selection" that speaks to what powers it... to what does the selecting of one critter over another, and leaving them safe to mate with the other successful ones, but that's just a theory as to how it happens.

The fact that evolution occurs isn't in question.

Anyway...

Some states are great and some never make it. And lately I've found myself wondering what it takes to make it. It's clear as a species, that we are moving away from joules in our diet as a predictor of a country's success.

If joules still rated as a success marker, I for one would be right up there as a candidate for some kind of award. I have virtually unlimited access to calories, but I'm not sure if it would do me any good. And even less sure it does my country any good.

So if not calories, then what? Some say necessity is the mother of invention. I say necessity is the non gender specific parent of making do with a bit of fencing wire.

I think the thing that creates true innovation is discontent.

The result is that it's not the meek that will inherit the earth...



It's the miserable.




120 Things in 20 years - In thinking  "population density, innovation, and some evolution", it seems everything is progressing according to plan.

Thinking - The Invention Engine

These last few weeks have found me often running the same question through the invention engine to see if I can contribute in some way to getting the power requirements of an aquaponics system down low enough that it becomes viable to run from a solar panel, or at least to try to make it cost as little atmospheric carbon as possible.

I just keep running the same question through the invention engine with the new parameters. ie "NOT all the stuff that's been thought of before".

I remember reading about some design software that made TV antennae that I think were built into the TVs and were created using a printed circuit board that had a zillion lines that related to harmonics of the frequencies (or something - it may have been a dream - and if so, I just had an idea) But the result was you couldn't patent the design, or rather there was no point, because there were a zillion combinations of lines that would work just as well or better than the first one the design software would spit out.

All the opposition would have to do is run similar software with an additional "NOT that one those other people made" bit of code and they would have a brand new invention that worked just as well but was very different.

The people who made the software would use it to solve problems (like the travelling sales[person] problem for people.

The travelling salesman problem has been around for a long time, and there are a lot of different approaches to solving it. This made me very aware of the "NOT that one approach".

Often I'll come up with a solution, just for a plumbing problem or something, and run the problem again with the "NOT that last solution" added into the thinking process, just in case there is another option.

So far, every single time I've tried it, there has always been more than one solution to even complicated ideas and inventions.

It makes me want to put the invention engine through itself with the "NOT that one clause" added.

That should be it's final test. The downside being that I might have to start testing again from scratch.



120 Things in 20 years is now a place where I'm thinking you may soon see me get stuck in an endless loop of testing the invention engine process by re-inventing the invention engine with the invention engine, then re-inventing that with the new invention engine. Forever.

Handmade fishing lures - How to get the most out of your printer

Painting lures is easier if you don't know how.

I don't, so I'm already well on my way.

I started by owning a printer. That bit was easy. Actually all of this is easy.

Basically I'm describing how to get the most out of your printer by asking it to make handmade fishing lures, like the one pictured on the left, instead of whatever it is you do with your printer at the moment.

I nabbed a copy of "Gimp". Gimp or GNU Image Manipulation Program is a free graphics program that some very nice people make so people like us don't have to buy the offerings of other people. They do it because it makes them feel good. Giving stuff away is kind of a cure for everything that's wrong in the world.

You can get the Gimp here http://www.gimp.org/. I happen to use Linux (also free) but there is a download for everyone regardless of what operating system you use.

I'll be doing a rather plain example here so you can see how good it will look, even though it wont be too flashy. I'll also keep it plain so as not to distract from the method. I'll not be too fussed about any minor errors. Seeing some errors and seeing just how little they matter on the finished lure gave me a stack of confidence the first time I tried this.

Design

My first step was to give myself some kind of guide line, so I started with a black smudge. What I'm doing here is only going to be one side, the left. When I'm happy with the left side I'll copy it to the right, then flip it so it lines up. This line just gives me a general indication of the thickening of the lure from tha tail at the bottom, to the head at the top.

Add some background colour with the airbrush tool. The good thing about painting on the screen rather than on a lure is the undo feature. hold Ctrl and hit Z to undo what you just did if it isn't right.

Generally speaking, if you want something to look a little organic, you are best off adding something like a stripe in a few layers of slightly different colour.

I started with a large circle as my airbrush tool, and set it so it painted at about half thickness so you could still see through it a bit.

By keeping it see through and a bit vague, you can go over it a few times with different sized and or different coloured strokes that can be blurred into each other later to give some natural looking gradients.

My next step was to add the beginnings of my top coat. Things that fly tend to have darker tops and lighter undersides so that if they are being attacked from underneath they are light against the light sky, and from above, darker against the darker bottom. Fish fly but they do it under water.

I added a little blur to blend it all in a bit. (Ignore the smudges on the right hand side because they will be cut away. The final cut will be straight up from the "0" in the label "120 things in 20 years" at the bottom of the pic. The smudges are just me testing my brush settings)

Within Gimp and other similar programs, there are filters you can apply. I used a filter to blur the work a few steps back. Other filters do all kinds of things from making your work look like a chalk drawing , to making it look like a mosaic. I used this one that just gave it a bit of texture that reminded me a bit of scales. On others I've done, I've used a tiling filter that added hexagons all over to again give the impression of scales.

I added some random speckle (another filter) and some more green.

I also added the eye which is an adaption of  the "Livered" eyes from my previous post on eyes.

This seems like a lot of steps but its quick, and you can reuse your design to make as many lures as you want. All of them exactly the same, or with whatever variation you might want.

Now to add the dark top I mentioned. This time in very dark green. Unlike life, remember you can use Ctrl + Z to undo if you don't like anything you have done.

Having settled on an outline you are happy with, fill in the rest. Don't be too worried about how unnatural it looks, any wobbly lines or whatever. I promise it will look amazing when its finished.

I blurred just the very dark green section allowing the colour to bleed into the lighter surrounds.

Added some arrows because, in a while, we will be cutting this image into strips and we will want to know which way is up.

At this stage its a good idea to place a dot or a thin line at the corners of what will be your left hand side of your lure. This will make it easier to line up your halves when you combine them.

Almost there.  I copied the left half and paste it to a new image, then flipped the original image horizontally, then copy and past it to the new image.

The result is both halves perfectly lined up.

If you look closely at the top you will see the white line I added to aid in lining up the two halves.




The only final step is to add your name, a model number or date if you care. Or you could name your lure, or do nothing. I did this. Feel free to save this image (right click - save as (even if you cant see all the image it should be there.), print, and try it out. [ Afterthought from the future - If you add a name it's a good idea to add it a bit higher up the stripe than I have here. Make it so the bottom of the name is slightly above the center of the stripe. (for reasons, see the future) ]

The next step is to take your 2D lure and make it 3D.

Decoupage

Start with a hand carved wooden lure with a slot cut for a bib, and holes drilled for the rear and belly hook hang points.

At this stage its best to seal your lure with a wood sealing product to make it water proof in case the lacquer coats get cracked or chipped. To seal you can simply dip your lure by putting a toothpick into the hole drilled for the rear tow point eyelet.

Draw a center line across the back and belly to aid in keeping everything inline.

Take your printout and make sure you have some points that are the same on each side so you can fold it and be certain the image will line up on both sides. I'll use the top and bottom arrows on each side. The next image might explain better.

Cut away some image so you will be able to fold the image exactly in half. In hindsight a better way might have been to draw a box around my entire design.

Now fold it in half along the lure design's spine and crease it firmly.

Measure your lure, and make sure you have around one third more lure design than lure.

I'm using around 120 mm of lure design for my 90mm lure.

Trim any excess. (In my case I cut at the end of the ruler). If you were making a lot of this one design you can edit your image so its cut to the correct size to save ink.

I tend to cut my strip around 15mm wide but it will vary depending on the size and design of your lure.

The strips will be glued on around the lure until it 's covered.

It's worth noting at this stage that there will be some overlap with each new strip being glued over the edge of the last. This means that if there is a pattern on your lure, you may need to take it into account when deciding where to cut each strip. With a striped design like this one, I found its best to cut so that your cut goes through the tip of each stripe. The main thing is to cut at the same place relative to the stripe so that as each one is laid down, the overlapping makes for a desirable design.

Apply some PVA wood glue to the back of the strip.

Take note of the arrows to be sure front is to the front.

Starting at the tail end, lay the strip over the back of the lure so that it can wrap around to the underside. Use the crease in the center of the design to line up with the line you drew on the back of the lure. Bring it around to pinch together at the underside, aligning the meeting of the two ends of the strip with the line you drew on the belly.

Bend the joined strips to one side and crease the paper.

Then bend the other way and crease again.

Cut the excess off at this stage, so that it is as closely cropped to the belly of the lure as you can.

Small adjustment can be made when you press down the ragged bits from the cutting away of the excess. By pushing the seam down and to a side, you can adjust a bit for any error.

Don't worry if it looks a big rough. You will be amazed at the final result I promise.

To check against any secret lure making super powers I might have accidentally picked up, I got my mum to make one and it was perfect the first time with only these instructions to follow. She had never made a lure before, or anything like it.

This is a bit difficult to see, but I found the best way to apply the glue to each strip is to lay some paper over the edge of a table and stick it down with a weight or some tape.

Add a drop of glue to the side right on the edge and then run your strip over the glued bit a few times. This gives an even coat, no excess, and keeps your fingers clean. The glue only needs to be applied to about half the length of the strip.

Add another strip. Remember to cut through the tip of any stripe on your design.

The amount of overlap will depend on the shape of your lure. The reason we are doing this in strips rather than all in one piece is because the strips, and their overlap, adjust for the shape and prevent creases. It also adds a lot to the finished product to have the strips turn into stripes.

It's now possible to see this thing taking shape.

Most of the things you might think are going to be flaws or compromises will in fact turn out to be features.

Things like the overlaps, the seams, and even fingerprints of glue, will be seen in a very different light as soon as we add some gloss coats to this beastie.

If you have added a name or are using my design and don't want to hide the name, make sure you remember the overlap.

Cut the strip before the name strip so that the name is on the bottom of it's strip otherwise the one after it will overlap the name and cover it.

This is the strip before the one with the name on it.

Note the stripe pattern, even though its cut, is still repeating nicely.

I should have put the name a little further toward the front so that it fell higher up the stripe. The strip isn't quite cut at the correct spot here, but this gives an indication of why I wanted to cut them where I did.

It wont matter.

It will work perfectly and will look amazing. I promise.

The same stage but from the top.

The next one gets a bit tricky because of the curve of the lure, and because it's the strip with the eyes.

I leave the eye one and skip to the one after the eyes.

This is a view of the lure looking straight at the front. Adding a flat piece of paper to a surface curved in two directions is difficult, so I cut a V out of the center to allow for the excess paper and prevent wrinkles.

Don't be too fussed if there is a gap or some bare wood visible. Don't worry if there are creases you cant get out, tears in the paper or anything else. If something goes wrong here you can cut out a scrap of paper and add it, you can colour it in with a marker, or do nothing.

For one thing, fish don't look at this end so much, because they tend to be chasing it from behind.

But more importantly, it's going to look amazing in the end. Trust me.

I promise.

There are a few different ways to progress here. In the past I've treated the eyes as just another strip, or as with this time, I've glued them on as  eyes. But always I found it best to add eyes, or the eye strip, last.

In this case I cut them out after measuring where they needed to sit to keep out of the way of the bib.

I decided to leave a bright band of green between them.

Then decided I didn't like the bright band, which was lucky because now I get to show just how much it doesn't matter.

No matter what you do it will look great. I promise.

I decided to colour the green bit between the eyes with a blue biro.

I also used the biro on the tip of the tail where the first bit of paper didn't reach.

This is one of those features I promised. On the finished product it will add some nice natural qualities to the look of this lure.

I think it already looks organic. It reminds me of a moth or shrimp.

The eyes are a little rough, and are upside down I think, but it wont matter.

I promise.

One option for eyes might be stick on craft eyes. The kind of things kids might glue to pet rocks. Another might be to forget this handmade fishing lure making caper, and just sit down with some kids and make some pet rocks.


Clear coat

To make handling easier, and to keep your new lure clean and dust free whilst you paint it, jam a stick into the hole in its tail that will one day be for the rear hook eyelet.

The stick will also allow you to keep the lure off the ground when you dry it, or even mount it in some kind of rotating thing to make the coat dry more evenly.

My next move was to dip the lure into a pot of varnish. I bought "marine grade timber varnish" by a company called Bondall.

I have no idea if this is suitable but it seems to work. From what I've read, two part epoxies are the strongest finish for a lure but I think this product I'm using is a good place to start. Ask for some advice at your hardware store, or use whatever you have at hand.

The secret is to get as thin a coat as you can, and do multiple coats.

Mine looked like this the next day when it was nearly dry.

A lot of people use spray guns, spray cans of paint, or air brushes. I don't have any of those, and don't have the skills to use them.



One important thing to do when dipping is to lift the work out very slowly. I take 30 seconds or more to lift the lure out of the varnish. This makes for a much thinner coat, and a smoother coat. Any air bubbles in the varnish follow the slow, outgoing tide and stay in the varnish rather than being left behind on the lure.

Another thing that will get you a quality finish is rotating your lure as it dries. At first I would roll the stick between my fingers to stop drips forming, but later made a device to rotate them for me.

I'm told the motors and gearboxes in microwaves that operate the turntable work well. As do BBQ rotissery motors. This was once a photocopier fan geared motor. It was also once an experimental automatic fish feeder. Now its a lure drier. [you can also just buy a 12 volt electric motor and gearbox for around $20 from hobby shops or electronics shops - look for a shaft speed of around 30 RPM]

A light sanding, with a fine sandpaper between coats, will get rid of air bubbles, dust, and any insects that may have tried living on your wet lure as it dried.

Any imperfections at this stage will be amplified as you add coats of clear, and will lessen the quality of your finish, so the sanding is a good idea.


I'm rushing the time between coats a bit for the sake of getting this post out. You should really make sure the lure is absolutely dry before adding your next coat to ensure a great finish, and good strength. If you rush, or apply too thick a coat, you get ripples in your varnish, and it will take weeks to dry.

The second coat looks like this...

And the finished product looks like this.

I would guess each lure would take around 25 minutes to glue on the printed design, and if you were dipping five at a time, the dipping might take 10 minutes each all up for four coats.

In spite of the number of times I may have mentioned you needn't worry about being fussy, the final finish largely depends on how careful you are. If I tried to make a perfect lure, I wouldn't want to risk actually using it, so some compromise is required. I think fingerprints and seams add to the final appeal of the finished lure, but I can see why some might want to take a little more pride in the finish.

If I made 10 of these at a time, and if I made some jigs to cut bib slots etc, I think I could make a ready to fish version of the lure pictured here in an hour and a half per lure. That would include

• carving the lure body from a dowel 
• shaping the bib (3 or 4 at a time on the grinder)
• making wire eyelets and gluing them in place
• gluing on the printed design
• applying four coats of clear by dipping
• and 15 minutes for things I haven't thought of

That hour and a half would be spent in sections over two weeks or more depending on the temperature because of drying times for the clear coats.

There are probably a stack of tips I've forgotten to pass on in this post, and I think I'll edit this to try to overcome any shortfall. One tip I can add is that I had some good results printing on coloured paper. It saves printer ink, and its possible to buy pads of different colour of very thin paper. The thinner the paper the smaller the segment ridges where each strip overlaps are. Personally, I prefer the segment ridges and have had some good results with highlighting them with a red marker pen, but is an option worth exploring.

whew. big post. but now I have some more room in my head

[ edit from the future - This post on my tiny super lightweight lures  might interest anyone who found this useful ]

Thinking - Generally dissatisfied

Thinking is harder than you think.

Before I started 120 things in 20 years, I could count to 59 on my fingers. I thought that was quite clever of me.

It was quite clever of me.

But I thought I'd employ a technique that I'v been using in my life recently to see if I could count to 120, in the hope of getting parents all over the world to insist that their schools make it mandatory for all students to subscribe to my blog.

The technique I employed, and have been employing, was to be generally dissatisfied.

I still cant count to 120, but now I can count to 99.

The method I was using was to count 1,2,3,4 with the fingers of my right hand, use the right thumb alone as 5, then 6,7,8,9 are created using the right thumb(5) plus the right fingers. Then use the left digits for 10's.

The wacky thing is, it never occurred to me to do the same "thumb is 5" thing on my left hand. Crazy! Why should I be able to count to 9 on my right hand but not think to be able to count to 90 on my left.

It turns out it's a well known counting (and calculating - just add the digits then add the 10's) technique and it seems to be called "chisanbop" and appears to come from Korea. I had probably heard of it or seen it on tv before I "invented" it. For all I know it was an important part of my schooling. I really should have paid some attention.

The point here is once I knew something could be done with my right hand, for some reason I didn't expand the idea to include what could be done with my left hand.

Sometimes solutions are staring us in the face and yet we don't notice them. Often the solution is being used to solve some other, similar problem. All we need to do is look it up. Sometimes we can even use the problem as part of the solution.

My Favorite form of invention is when someone uses the force they are trying to overcome against itself. An example might be using a lever with a series of weights added to it to lift something. So using gravity to overcome gravity. Or using the fact that hot air rises to create a cooling breeze by building a tall glass chimney on the top of your house, and opening a window at ground level. (cooling tower)

I'm going to try to get better at this thinking business. In fact, I've already started.