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I upgraded to Jaunty yesterday and again had to struggle with my wireless. This time, it wasn't necessary to install a new kernel module. Instead, I just needed to remove Network Manager and set up wpa_supplicant . Here's my new /etc/network/interfaces that I configured for my WPA2 PSK AES TLA network. auto wlan0 iface wlan0 inet dhcp wpa-driver wext wpa-conf managed wpa-ssid myssid wpa-ap-scan 1 wpa-proto RSN wpa-pairwise CCMP wpa-group CCMP wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK wpa-psk mypsk With that, all I needed to do was sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart .

Tonight I threw together a quick plant monitor. I followed the directions for the Botanicalls Twitter DIY to build a moisture detection circuit (I used a 2N3904 transistor). It works pretty well. I found that the analog readings tend to be quite high and do not vary much (450 for dry soil, 545 for moist soil, 555 for a glass of water). I think these variables probably need to be adjusted to match individual conditions. The plan is to move this quick and dirty Arduino prototype to an ATtiny13 with wireless data transfer and solar power. Using the tiny13, I should be able to monitor 3 plants (without disabling the reset pin). Here's my Arduino code and pictures. int PROBE_PIN = 5; void setup() { Serial.begin(9600); } void loop() { int val = analogRead(PROBE_PIN); delay(1000); Serial.println(val); }

Ever since I upgraded to Ubuntu Ibex, my wireless has stopped working. Network Manager was able to scan and display available networks, but couldn't connect. I waited a while to see if a patch might fix it, but none did. I got it working again tonight. My solution involves removing Network Manager (which isn't a problem for me since I'm doing this on my desktop). Basically, I followed some directions from the Ubuntu Forums . However, I've made some small changes and added some instructions where I felt there were gaps. Disable and remove Network Manager. sudo killall NetworkManager sudo apt-get remove network-manager Remove the rt61pci module and blacklist it to prevent it from loading in the future. sudo modprobe -r rt61pci echo 'blacklist rt61pci' | sudo tee -a \ /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist Download the serialmonkey rt61 legacy CVS tarball and install it. tar zxvf rt61-cvs-daily.tar.gz cd rt61-cvs*/Module make sudo cp rt61.ko \ /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kern...

I bought two RF links from SparkFun a while back (a 315Mhz and a 434Mhz ). A few nights ago, I actually hooked one of them up and successfully ran a test program between two Arduinos. Here's the code for the receiver: #define rxPin 2 #define txPin 3 byte incomingByte = 0; SoftwareSerial rfSerial = SoftwareSerial(rxPin, txPin); void setup() { pinMode(rxPin, INPUT); pinMode(txPin, OUTPUT); rfSerial.begin(2400); Serial.begin(2400); } void loop() { incomingByte = rfSerial.read(); Serial.println(incomingByte, DEC); incomingByte = 0; } And for the transmitter: #define rxPin 2 #define txPin 3 SoftwareSerial rfSerial = SoftwareSerial(rxPin, txPin); byte outgoingByte = 0; void setup() { pinMode(rxPin, INPUT); pinMode(txPin, OUTPUT); rfSerial.begin(2400); Serial.begin(2400); } void loop() { Serial.println(outgoingByte, DEC); rfSerial.println(outgoingByte, BYTE); outgoingByte++; delay(10); } Pretty simple. It just sends the numbers 0-255 repeatedly and prints them out to seria...