rho @rho@fosstodon.org

It's a happy feeling to get a harvest this time of year, even if it's tiny. Definitely a crop I'll be growing in future Winters. The cool weather keeps them very mild.
#gardening

Experimenting with automating a small oil heater in the cold frame to take the edge off some of these cold February mornings. Wired up a GFCI outlet with a Zigbee controller that I have talking with my Home Assistant installation.

Using this as practice for a thermostat project I've been thinking about for the house.

Fully Charged was a lot of fun today! Got to see the Rivian truck, and talk with one of the battery engineers. It was very impressive. However, I found myself drawn to the e-bikes and classic cars that had been given an EV retrofit. I left feeling like we're really on the cusp of EVs being ubiquitous.

After more sleep and less beer I came to my senses. I do want MQTT here, and I simply needed to use something like telegraf to get the data over to influx. Starting to come together now!

Success getting temp and humidity data from two off the shelf 433mhz sensors (one in the garden, and one in the cold frame). Then piping that to MQTT. Using an RTL-SDR dongle, a small dipole, and rtl_433.

It was only after this initial excitement that I realized it probably makes more sense to send this directly to influx db. 🤦‍♂️

This is just mind-boggling.

"The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has produced the highest resolution observations of the Sun’s surface ever taken. ... The cell-like structures – each about the size of Texas – are the signature of violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the sun to its surface."

https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/first-light-cropped-field-movie/

Small weekend garden project; building a cold frame! Typically I get seeds started indoors under a grow light, but as the garden has grown in size I've run out of room for starts. This should free up a lot of space (or give me an excuse to expand the garden further).

Reworked my network board last night. Swapped to a larger switch, and added some of the always-on SBC's.

I should probably just get a small rack, but sometimes it's fun to sit down, listen to some music, and craft something.

Ran down to Schertz, TX today for the San Antonio Radio Fiesta. Passed the test to upgrad my license to the General class!

While I was there I picked up a couple items at the swap. A couple Kenwood radios for VHF/UHF (2m/70cm) from the 80's to use at my bench, and a TEN-TEC 252 power supply to match my old TEN-TEC Argosy.

#hamradio

Obsessing over tonight's weather at a very messy desk.

I received a hot air rework station as a gift this year. I'm intending to use it for very small SMD soldering. But first, as a test and practice, I decided to harvest some components off a crusty board from an old boom box.

NOAA posted a cool animation for Winter Solstice today. One full disk image from GOES16 per day for the last year.

Happy Solstice, the light is returning!

I'm starting to realize some of the freedom zigbee2mqtt with the CC2531 (usb dongle in the vid) are giving me in the IoT space.

It's something I've always avoided because I didn't want to have to buy into some ecosystem with a hub that's constantly calling home to the corporate overlords. For testing I picked up a couple zigbee enabled
Phillips Hue bulbs from a big box store, and was able to control them from a home assistant install on my NAS via an MQTT broker. That makes me the overlord!

Successfully flashed firmware to a CC2531 using an Arduino Leonardo!

This makes the USB stick a Zigbee coordinator for use with zigbee2mqtt, and saves the expense and waste of purchasing a CC debugger/programmer.

Cast iron dinner rolls turned out well.
#bread

The case arrived from FalbaTech! I went with the simple white one expecting to paint it, however I couldn't resist putting it all together. Finally putting this project to some use.

After some delay a set of keycaps arrived. All that's left is a case!

Just returned from an anniversary camping trip with the wife. A lovely weekend in the Texas hillcountry. The weather was cool and clear; a nice break from everyday trappings.

Messing around with an RTL-SDR this evening using rtl_433
( https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433 ) to decode the signal from a cheap off the shelf weather station I have out in the garden.
I'm having some ideas for future projects with this.

For fun here is the tail end of a time lapse I had running while piecing this together.