One area that has not had enough development at this point is the ability to read and process the event log and data log EEPROM devices. This will, once the system is fully on-line allow us to display the events and data in a human readable form.

The system writes on a circular buffer basis all significant events to the event log, it also writes all key parameters such as temperature, current, voltage, key systems states, etc. on a 15 second basis.

In many countries, the clocks go forwards and backwards at certain dates during the year, but what does this actually do ? This is the question that I found myself considering as the clocks were about to "fall back" in time and I was trying to figure out what needed to change in my code to permit this functionality.

For example, does the RTC chip in the computer move forwards automatically at that time and if it does, will it do that in hardware on its own, or do we have to code that up ?

Now that we have the Rotator board, we have another Arduino microcontroller. This is slaved from the main Arduino which normally drives it, so there is no direct path from my development PC to the device which will make programming it a little difficult. we can't even go direct to it since its physically in the Chicken coop too.

So, how are we going to program it if we need to do a firmware update ?

OK, so we can spin a motor, but where do we actually point the thing to get the sunlight that we need to charge our batteries and what time do we need to open or close the pop hole door on the coop ?

As a human, its easy, you know where the big bright thing is in the sky that you're not allowed to look at or it will hurt your eyes and you can see when it comes up in the morning and dissappears with a fantastic sunset in the evening,  but how do you explain this to a little Arduino that doesn't even have eyes in the first place ?

Early in the development, the concept of using ssh to get to the Raspberry Pi and minicom to see the output of the serial.print was established as a natural extension of the standard Arduino serial monitor. This gives a simple way to help in debugging, however what was not implemented early on was the ability to send commands to the Arduino, this was assumed to be done solely by pressing the buttons on the front of the unit.