My watering system monitored withAzure is now fully operational for three plants.

The connected computer is an Educake from ICOP, it measures three sensors and is able to pump water individually in each pot.
   

The system is connected to a timer socket progammed to wake up once a day. The information reported to Azure by the Educake contains humidity and watering time for each pot.

This configuration has been running for a week and Azure data allows me to calibrate the watering parameters. Unplanted sensor (dry) gives a 1024 value, and fully dipped sensor gives a 400 value.
As I'm checking humidity, I decide to reverse the scale : 600 = watered - 0 = dry, one week of recording shows the following graph:

Now Let's go to vacation!...

The Windows 10 UWP app CleanupVS is now in The Store. Its a free app for cleaning up Visual Studio workspaces by recursively deleting bin and obj folders from Visual Studio project folders. This article covers some of the code techniques used in he app.

Including, quick folder count, app metadata, using the Feedback Hub and populating a RichTextbox.

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Before my summer vacations, I decided to build a watering system for my decorative trees. The soil moisture is measured with a cheap IoT sensor and the water supply uses 12V airpumps pushing air in water bottles (this makes a safe separation between electric and water circuits), the electronic schema is as follows:

The 86Duino Educake computer monitors the humidity level once a day and will pump water if the level is too low, it sends data to Azure therefore I'll be able to see how things are going on...

As I discussed in a previous blog article, the Raspberry PI3 Bluetooth driver for Windows 10-IoT-Core becomes errant and misses updates when the update rate is high. This is a known issue with the RPI. This problem does not exist other Windows 10 systems including the Dragonboard running IOT-Core. This article again discusses the problem and presents a workaround that does work. Includes how to disable/enable a driver using devcon.

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Despite its detractors, Microsoft has of late has embraced OpenSource with a vengeance. Much code is now available on GitHub under the Microsoft moniker for developers to tweak, extend, debug and contribute. opensource.microsoft.com is the central location for it.

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Solved: How to use one line per item in a UWP XAML ListView

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