SWH project part 10 - temperature logging 2

Like I said yesterday, in the quiet patches between the bulk of the project making any headway, some progress has been made on my temperature monitoring system.  It all works happily enough on the desk; the next step is to get all the sensors mounted and wired up in a waterproof way and see if it still behaves out in the wet muddy real world.

Green and happy.
(no sensors plugged in just now, so values are nonsense.)

Nice and ordered in theory...

...a little more disorderly in real life.

Turning a 2D layout into a 3D structure and mounting it all in a tapering
cylindrical tub is an interesting challenge.

The multiplexer board will be mounted out at the panel site (in another
plastic tub), gathering together the inputs from 16 temperature sensors.
This means I only need 2 bits of wire 40m long instead of 16.

When panel overheat, SolarBot angry is!
He may even have a tantrum of irritating beeping noises until someone
does something about it.

Tribal wedding part 2

Our second tribal wedding experience was equally colourful. The groom was the son of neighbours of the family we were staying with and the two families are very close. Things were made more dramatic when the groom-to-be was involved in a motorcycle accident a day or so before the ceremonies. No-one wears a helmet here and he was no exception, so was kept in hospital overnight for observation after a head injury before being given the all clear. A carefully placed bandana was then an integral part of his outfit to conceal the worst of the abrasions on his forehead!

Once again we attended the Mehndi ceremony with the groom’s side of the family first; more food, more dancing this time including a spectacular one with multiple coloured dupattas and more guests sleeping in corners.



Most of the guests stayed the whole night and then travelled with the Barat (the groom’s party of family and friends) on a bus to the bride’s village. We snuck off for a couple of hours sleep in a bed before heading on to the wedding itself - departure time 4:30am.

The walk across the fields to the bride's village.

The groom being escorted into the village.

There was some food and then some dancing.



We went into visit the bride who was sitting in a small room with her face covered, surrounded by female relatives. The bride isn’t meant to look happy at the wedding, as:
a. she is leaving her family,
b. if she looks happy people might think she has met her husband before the wedding and that there has been some sort of hanky-panky.

After some more biryani there was some circle dancing followed by the wedding ceremony itself. This involved a few words being said, some rings and then the bridal couple walking 4 times round a pole in the middle of small tent that the ceremony takes place in.

It was all incredibly colourful.

The groom in all his finery.

The bride's face is covered by a dark green veil for the duration.

Walking round the pole, tied together with a piece of cloth.

The groom's procession, with new wife in tow, heading back out of the village.

Loading up the dowry.  The bride leaves alone on a bus full of strangers.

Following this there was more dancing while the bride goes back into her house to get ready to go. This part is called the “Rukhsati” where the bride, (complete with her dowry of household goods,) leaves with the groom and his family. Apparently this can sometimes take hours but at this wedding she came out remarkably quickly. She does this ritual crying and it is often pretty emotional as she leaves her family and the only life she’s known behind.

She then goes back to the groom’s parents house where they start their married life!

SWH project part 9 - framing up

The project continues forward in bounds and thuds, much like a sack race where the competitors have labyrinthitis.  If the momentum is not kept up then the workshop guys get diverted back onto their other work (fair enough I suppose!), so it's taken a little while to get things moving again since our little break.  So I've had a fairly quiet couple of weeks working on my temperature monitoring electronics - more on that another day.

Still, this week we've started making some progress again, with I and one of the guys making a start at getting the frames put in position.  A decent trench has been dug for the pipes between the array and the laundry - and will probably remain open for a least a couple of weeks until we get our pipes and pipe insulation sorted out.

The frames are covered in several coats of nasty brown oily stuff which apparently stops the termites getting interested in our wood, and also keeps the rain out.  The downside is that you get covered in nasty brown oily stuff while working on them.  Which begs the question "why didn't we wait until it was assembled before coating them?".  No idea - they were already being painted when I came into work one morning.

We've had a couple of teething problems to work round, of the "how-do-I-screw-this-screw-in-now-that-I've-placed-things-in-such-a-way-that-I-can't-get-at-it-with-my-screwdriver" nature, along with the more expected little-bits-of-drill/saw/file-work to make things fit together properly, but on the whole I'm quite pleased that it's coming together more or less as I'd expected.

I'm not really sure what this little concrete step is for...

A little old man with a huge beard was hired in to dig this trench for the pipes.

The first cross-piece about to be fixed in.  Note our safe and healthy
collection of home-made extension leads in the foreground.

We managed to get the nearest 3 lined up rather beautifully (though I say so
myself); the ones on the far side might require a little judicious application
of power-tools to get them quite right.  There needs to be a gentle slope up
towards the middle to prevent bubble traps. 

Sprung is spring!

The last week or two has seen the temperature rise from heaters-always-on, wear-at-least-3-layers to toasty t-shirt weather.  Well, it would be if such garments were appropriate...

The colourful flowers are coming back out...

...the trees are covered in pretty blossom...

...more interesting birds are starting to make appearances...
(doesn't appear in my bird book, but similar in size and shape to a Tree Pie;
it has fantastic stripes on its tail which become visible in flight.)

...the little grassland butterflies return with a vengeance...
(a Dark Clouded Yellow)

...while the big fancy swallowtails have reappeared
(albeit near the tops of the trees to take advantage of
all that blossom nectar).  This is a Common Peacock.

The Roseringed Parakeets didn't go anywhere,
but I finally got close enough with the camera!

Tribal wedding part 1

As Jo mentioned previously, while we were down in the south of the country we got to go to part of two tribal weddings. We’ve been to one up at the hospital before but this time was a very different experience.

The first wedding was happening on the night we arrived, (from the UK, a journey that included a 7 hour layover in Dubai airport where the marble floors are not very conducive to catching up on sleep!). Some friends kindly let us crash at their house for a couple of hours before our host picked us up and we hopped on a bus to go to the city a couple of hours away where the wedding was going to be. Unfortunately the bus was only half full when we got on and wasn’t going anywhere fast. Apart from the Daewoo most buses here wait till they are full before they go anywhere - I guess you’ve got to get your money’s worth out of the trip. Fine as long as you don’t need to be somewhere by a particular time. After a quick chat with a fellow passenger we decided to hire a car with him to get to our planned destination, a bit more pricey but at least we got there before the wedding was over.

We arrived at about 9pm at the groom’s village in time for the first part of the celebrations, the Mehndi. The bride wasn’t there for this part, I think her family and friends were holding an equivalent celebration somewhere else. Not quite a stag do or a hen party but maybe that’s the closest equivalent. Before any of this though, I had to get into my outfit for the evening, kindly lent to me for the occasion. The families of the bride and groom are part of the Kachhi tribe and their clothes are a bit different from the usual shalwar kameez. Negotiating all the cloth was a little bit tricky by torchlight but the groom’s female relatives soon had me fixed up.

One of the best things was that the food came at the beginning of the evening, usually you have to wait until right at the end by which point you’re beyond hunger. A delicious biryani was served up on pieces of newspaper, (saves on the washing up,) and we all sat on the floor and ate it with our fingers (takes a bit of practice with rice).

Next we had the Mehndi ceremony itself. The groom was sat down and everyone took it in turns to go up, wave some money round his head then put it in a basket, paint some henna on his hand (actually a piece of paper he was holding) and feed him a small piece of mithai (sweet stuff). We managed when it was our turn, I’m not sure we did it all in the right order but hopefully that doesn’t matter.

Then there was the dancing. First a group of girls did some stick dancing (see video below). One of the girls dropped out at the last minute and as it was one I had learnt before I was hastily drafted in. No opportunity to practice first but fortunately I was near the back and the girls kept me in line.

Following this there was a traditional circle dance that everyone could join in. A guy stood in the middle and played different songs on his dhol (double-ended drum) and everyone sang along and danced in a circle around him. The were just 4 basic steps - across, to the side, back and to the side but the men then added a series of crazy leaps, twirls and other flourishes. The women just did the basic step - I’m not sure if this is because that’s tradition or because of the crazy amounts of cloth we were wearing.

After this we headed home, (a mere 3 hours away,) but most of the guests stayed on to then travel to the bride’s village the next day for the wedding itself. It seems like a pretty exhausting thing to do the night before your wedding but fortunately it’s quite acceptable to find a blanket and a corner to sleep in.

Part 2 is here.

International advertising variations

The first part of our trip home a few weeks ago was aboard the Daewoo Express, which I think we've mentioned before.  On the Daewoo they show an in-flight movie, but the one time I tried to watch it I wished I hadn't bothered due to the sheer frequency and length of the advert breaks - usually with exactly the same adverts each time.

So this time I wasn't watching, except for when one advert caught my eye.  It was an advert for chicken. K&N's chicken, to be exact.

At home I reckon raw meat isn't that high on the list of advertisers flagship products, and if it did make an appearance, you might expect a beautiful farmyard scene with handsome brown birds pecking away happily under yellow afternoon sunlight, perhaps followed by a close-up of some mouth-watering dish being cooked by some celebrity chef.  Not so here.

Instead, this advert was about 10 minutes long, and comprised an amazingly detailed study of the life of the broiler chicken, from egg to dinner plate.  It had the eggs being picked out.  It had the little chicks hatching.  It had thousands of white chickens scratching about on a dimly lit warehouse floor.  (They may have skipped over the 'this is how we kill them' part...)  It had gargantuan factory production lines with big shiny machines to gut, clean and disassemble chickens.  It had quality control galleries, where lab-coated technicians would, at the touch of a button, dispatch sub-par chickens from the ranks of pristine carcasses to some unknown destination below.  It had yet more shiny machines to shrink-wrap the meat ready for sale.  It even had a short foray into their logistics department, showing palettes being forklifted into gleaming fleets of trucks.

It was fascinating.

And a far cry from the sunny ignorance-of-all-the-nasty-bits we like in our food production.  I think it comes down to a difference in background.  Whereas in the UK, where we assume all our food meets some EU regulations for hygiene (and, if we're lucky, animal welfare), we go for the aesthetics:  the nice looking farmyard and the tasty looking recipe.  Here, the company wants to make sure they show off every last detail of its cleanliness and professionalism (however close that might be to the reality...), and thus how much better their product must be than the cheap dirty animal from down the bazaar.

Their final product/brand name screen sums it up with their slogan:  "Safe and healthy".

Safe?!

Camels, canals and a multitude of cats

We recently spent a week visiting some friends of our down in the Sindh, around 5 hours bus ride out of Karachi. We attended two tribal weddings, which I shall leave to Jenny to describe in all their colourful detail. For now, here's a few pictorial impressions of what it was like there...

It's much drier and dustier in general than up here in the mountains, except for
these brilliant pockets of green where water is diverted from the Indus for irrigation,
via a massive canal network built by the British back in colonial times.

Fancy sharing your living space with this chap?

Lots of pretty flowers around, and saw some brilliant little iridescent
what-may-or-may-not-have-been hummingbirds.

Our friends had four fairly magnificent Himalayan cats (two of which had kittens
on the same day while we were there).  Must be pretty toasty under all that fur!
This one's ginger relative could almost pass for a small lion...

They overload their trucks to an even more comical extent, especially when it's
less dense cargoes such as sugar cane.  Two have trouble passing each other.

We do have occasional camels up near us, but they're much more common here.
This one has a comparatively light load.

We came to Pakistan pretty much assuming we wouldn't get to swim anywhere
while we were here, but we were wrong, this delightful canal being floated down
in style.

Also worthy of note was another magnificent example of Pakistani roadworks, where a huge stretch of highway (1-2 hours drive) was being widened from 2 narrow lanes to about 6 by the looks of it.  What makes it interesting is the fact that they don't do it a little section at a time; no, it would be far grander to do all of it at once.  So step one, scrape off the old tarmac.  All 67km of it.  Now what's next?  Ah yes, gravel to lay the base for the extra width, delivered in hundreds of painted trucks.  And so on.

Which makes for an exciting drive (especially at night!):  bouncing over rough gravel and patches of old tarmac, blinded by the full beams of oncoming trucks, every now and then having to switch which "lane" you're driving in to avoid piles of newly-delivered gravel, and occasionally screeching to a halt in front of an unmarked 10-foot pit in the road.  Why do it any other way?

SWH project extra - visual progress report 2

The first set of legs go in.

7 feet of doubled-up 2" angle iron is not light.  Getting them lined up is a bit of a
nightmare - adjusting it in one degree of freedom also moves it in the other five
(forward/back, left/right, up/down, plus rotation around 3 axes = 6 Ds of F).

Back legs in place.  Nobody sneeze!

6 completed frames.

Front legs in place and both sets concreted in.

Rain over the last couple of weeks prevented much progress
while we were away, but yesterday and today have seen most
of the trenches filled in.