Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Hampture Mk.III is complete and read to deploy.

It's even inhabited. Meet Hamdrew Ryan, Ratlas and Nomtaine.


As you can see, our three hamsternaut heroes are getting used to their new habitat and figuring out where the various rooms are and what they contain. I've got a redundant battery backup pump system running and after about 90 minutes of chilling out and watching them they seem fine, which is consonant with the original calculations indicating that the deep water air pump moves enough air to sustain 15 hamsters. 3 seems to be no sweat. I modified the tubing so that air is now supplied to every single room rather than just two (relying on airflow to carry fresh air to the other two) as I figure it's safer. Even so, it makes me nervous knowing that soon they'll be living deep underwater for days on end.

The resistive heating pad is installed and powered on, they seem to be intrigued by it but they don't hang around on it for very long. I figure if I'm going to have it in the water overnight they'll need the heat source, and they'll figure out what it's good for then. I also installed the water nozzle, which works as expected, and I'll be installing the water filter on it sometime tomorrow. After that I've just got to clear out the pond area and figure out where I'm going to sink it.

Things are really moving quickly now! :3

6 comments:

  1. If you're gonna build the algae bioreactor system, you are gonna have to utilize a system like the biocoil to minimize power consumption and space.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm so excited for the testing of Mk. III. I love this project, man! Keep it up.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. do you have your own pond on your property?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Yes and no. Yes it is a pond. But it's artificial and currently filled with stuff. I've decided to make the short trek down to a much larger natural pond and simply hide the surface support gear.

    ReplyDelete
  6. sounds reasonable. just make sure kids dont get the chance to see it. you know why

    ReplyDelete