Hi everyone. 

This project is the first one that came out of this thread. @Rob+Appleby and I were discussing his WildSpy timer, the open source timer he developed. As we were discussing how to finish it for release, we got to sketching a wishlist of features. This is a variation on the original WildSpy open source timer design. It's using a less powerful CPU, but hopefully it's more accessible since it uses the Arduino platform which is quite well known and has a large, active community.

The OpenWild-Timer is in a very beta state at the moment, since this is more of a concept design to see what features are actually essential, what could be optional, and how this design can be optimized for power, cost, and functionality. I've decided to name the series of designs I work on OpenWild to signify that they will be an open source wildlife conservation technology toolkit. I'm hoping that the OpenWild series can be one of the toolkits that provide a base to a future evolving set of custom tools for wildlife researchers, conservationists, and zoological workers who are constantly pushing the boundaries of technology in their pursuit of understanding and saving the animals they work with. 

[AKIBA]

Here is a very beta version of the open source timer Rob and I were discussing. It has most of the features, but since it's a beta version, I reduced the feature set a bit. I also added some extra optional circuitry to control a water valve since I will be testing it on our greenhouse irrigation setup we have here. The final version won't have the water valve control. That will be for our open source farm toolkit :)

The features are:

* Li-Ion rechargeable battery 

* solar input with recharge circuitry

* 2.1mm DC input jack (AC adapter barrel jack, 6 to 12V)

* IP65 dustproof/waterproof enclosure

* Arduino-based

* DS3231 real time clock

* 1 relay output and one transistor output

* LCD interface

* user interface: 2 buttons, 1 rotary encoder (scroll wheel), 2 waterproof 5mm LEDs

The software is definitely still a work in progress. There's no timeline on it at the moment but I don't think it will take so long for a basic feature set. Right now, it has real time clock support, can toggle the relay, and can display on the LCD. After the alarm implementation and power management is finished, it should have enough features to start evaluating more detailed functionality. 

I've named it the OpenWild-Timer, and the open source tools we (freaklabs/hackerfarm) will be designing will be the OpenWild Toolkit. The github repo is here, albeit a bit sparse at the moment. 

OpenWild-Timer Github repository

Comments and feedback are welcome. I'll probably start a separate thread for this project, although I'm not sure what category it fits into. Any ideas? Or perhaps a general purpose open source project category?

Here are some pics.

Akiba