chris' random ramblings

We usually get a real Christmas tree if we’re going to be in town for Christmas. A real tree needs watering though, which is something we’ve been less than…consistent with over the past years.

I decided to do something about this and build something to alert me when the water level gets too low. Two strips of aluminum foil taped to either side of a piece of plastic provide my water sensor. One strip is connected to an analog input on the arduino, and the other strip is connected to +3.3V. When the sensor is submerged I get a reading of around 300 “units” from the ADC. When it’s removed from the water, a 10k pulldown resistor brings the reading down to 0.

I’ve hooked up a tri-colour LED to indicate various states, and plan to have an audible alert as well.

I’m not sure if the aluminum will end up corroding, nor if I’ll be able to power this off batteries for any length of time. Still, I’m pretty pleased with it so far!

Here you can see that LED is green when the sensor is submerged, and changes colours (like a traffic light, as per Thomas’ request) when the sensor is removed.

On November 8th we landed some changes that changed the way we do checkouts from hg. We enabled the hg share extension on android builds and started using internal hg mirrors to pull/clone from instead of hitting the main hg.mozilla.org.

The primary goal of this project was to reduce the load on the main hg server where developers often experience interrupted clones or slow pushes. If things got faster as a result, that would be a bonus.

I’m pretty happy with the impact on checkout times, especially on try android builds!

It seems like most of the gains came from enabling hg share on builds we weren’t previously using them on since the update times for win32 try builds weren’t affected; the only change for them would be pulling from the dedicated mirrors instead of the main hg.