Automation in our everyday lives

In the U.S., we are coming back from the first holiday of the summer season – Memorial Day.  Memorial Day was originally instituted as a day of remembrance of those brave souls who lived and died in service to our country.  Many people observe this holiday by visiting cemeteries and memorials of those who have passed on.  Others spend the day with family and friends at picnics, barbeques and sporting events.  Regardless of how you spend the day, it’s important that we appreciate the loved ones we have lost.  But let’s also take some time to appreciate the loved ones that are still in our presence.

You might be thinking, “What does appreciating our loved ones have to do with automation?”  It all comes down to time.  Many of us (myself included) get so busy with our everyday lives, that we often don’t make or take the time to spend with our spouses, children and friends.  Since I’m an engineer and my work life is focused on industrial automation, I naturally try to think of ways to automate things in my life. The more I can automate, the more I can simplify life, and the more time I have to spend with the people I care about.

Allow me to share a personal anecdote.  A year ago, on Father’s Day, my wife and girls gave me a couple of bird feeders as a gift.  Since we have a wooded backyard, we have a lot of birds, including a number of woodpecker species. For those who don’t know much about feeding birds, it can be quite a challenge to attract some of the unique species, and keep other wildlife from eating the bird food.  Needless to say, in the last year, bird feeding and watching has become quite a hobby of mine.  I view it as a challenge.  In my neighborhood, I’ve become known as the Bird Man, because of my obsession with attracting birds.

One lure for birds is a bird bath.  With all the birds and wildlife in the area, it’s a challenge to keep it full of fresh water.  The bird feeders and bath are a pretty good distance from the house, so it’s a pain (and a little time consuming) to unwind the hose every other day and drag it out to the bird bath.  Stay with me now.  Last summer, we also had some landscaping redone, which eliminated the need for an underground sprinkler head that happened to be (conveniently) located near the bird bath.  I have to say I didn’t plan that.  The automation engineer in me decided that there had to be a way to use the retired sprinkle head to automatically refill the bird bath every time the sprinkler system watered the lawn.  So I headed down to the local Home Depot and started my search for the necessary equipment. 

I found ¼-in. copper tube that I could use to feed water into the bath.  So now all I had to do was figure out a way to connect a ¾-in. sprinkler head fitting to a ¼-in. copper tube.  Fortunately, a friendly Home Depot employee noticed the confused look on my face and helped me pick out all the fittings to make the connection.  Now, all I needed is a manual valve so I could adjust the flow of water into the bird bath.  With about $15 worth of parts and 30 minutes assembly time, I created the automatic bird bath filler.  I just freed up a few hours of time this summer to do something else, like enjoying my family, friends and birds.

If you have any fun stories of how you automated something in your personal life, please share them in our forum on My.Automation.com.  Registration and/or login required.

Enjoy the rest of this Automation Weekly!

Rick Zabel
Vice President, Publisher

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