The Garden of Eden Creation Kit, or GECK, is the MacGuffan of Fallout 3 and the name of the modding tool for the same game. In the game, the GECK is a terraforming tool designed to turn the wasteland of Washington DC into its more natural form — an inhospitable swamp teeming with mosquitos.
A device to automatically terraform any environment is improbable now as it was in Wrath of Khan, but a “Garden of Eden Kit” is still a really great name. For their Hackaday Prize entry, [atheros] is building a simplified version of this terraforming device. Instead of turning the Tidal Basin into potable water or turning a nebula into a verdant planet, [atheros]’s Garden of Eden Watering Kit turns empty potted plants into a lush harvest of herbs.
The device, like most home gardening solutions presented in this year’s Hackaday Prize, isn’t geared towards irrigating acres of crops. This is just a simple, small device meant to water a few herbs growing in a pot on a balcony. The hardware consists of a Teensy LC and a small OLED for command and control. A soil moisture sensor goes into each pot, and a few 12V peristaltic pumps water the plants from a bucket reservoir.
For the home gardener, it’s the perfect setup to grow some herbs, some chilis, or a cherry tomato plant that produces a year’s worth of tomatoes every week. It’s a great adaptation of off the shelf tech, and a great entry for the Hackaday Prize.
guffan? isnt it guffin?
You win a prize! It’s a bag of LEDs!
“herbs”
Lol, probably. I like the idea of fresh tomatoes without having to do much.
Have to do something about those hornworms though. :(
Might be worth it for a perennial hot pepper bush, if you are into hot peppers.
I’ve given up with tomatoes, they’re easy enough to grow here, but tried planting early, normal, late varieties, staggering planting by weeks, to a month, but it’s all the same, suddenly TOMATOES… all the tomatoes, at once, then it’s curried tomatoes, tomato in aspic, fried tomatoes, tomato mousse, creme brulee avec tomato, and you don’t want to see another tomato for 6 months.
That’s the difference between deterimnate (bush) & indeterminate (vining) varieties. Try growing something indeterminate. you have 6-8 smaller tomatoes every week once they reach maturity.
My folks once moved a cherry tomato plant indoors and set it by their (south facing) patio door(s).
It provided them with a few little tomatoes each week. During the winter months, having a “real, flavored” tomato in a salad was worth it to them.
Project purity was the macguffin of Fallout 3. The G.E.C.K. was the macguffin of Fallout 2.
You had to recover a geck in 3, but it wasn’t the driving force of the plot. I guess you could call it a quest macguffin.
I stand corrected. Thank you.