rho @rho@fosstodon.org

@Tayo Right? Its hard to really fathom it. Giant spinning windmills, all the way to the horizon.

It's funny to think of Texas as a large renewable energy provider. The installed wind capacity ranks 5th in the world, exceeding all but China, the US, Germany, and India.

I was thinking about this as I just finished a drive back from Lubbock to Austin. The drive takes you through one of the largest onshore wind farms in the world, and it's quite a sight. I think the next time I head up there I'll try and get my dash cam to take a time-lapse to maybe capture the scale of things.

@kelbot Nice, that looks great!

@cypnk No Simpsonwave?

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.

@kelbot I kept telling myself I'd wait until the summer and see if it's still something I'm interested in. Seems like this will help me stick to that decision. Meanwhile I've got some handheld Linux envy going on.

@kelbot Ooo tough call. I've already seen a few posts from folks dyeing or painting them. They look really sharp.

@kelbot !!!
I somehow managed to hold out, but now that everyone is receiving them it's becoming increasingly difficult. Very excited to hear your thoughts about it!

@dctrud Woah! Too cool.

@dctrud Wow, I have almost no exposure to this. I had to look up half of what you mentioned here. I'd love to know more about what your up to with this project!

Fantastic interview with @neauoire on Future of Coding!

I especially love the discussion about workflow mentality. Taking tasks that you have endless motivation to do and directing them to things that you may not be as motivated/inspired to accomplish.

Anyway, its absolutely worth a listen:
https://omny.fm/shows/future-of-coding/44-making-your-own-tools-devine-lu-linvega

Spent last night getting rtl_433 dockerized (https://github.com/rh0/rtl433_to_mqtt) and running more permanently on a little Odroid that sits on the network.

Now I can't stop watching the graph of the garden temps. Every 5 minutes, pull up grafana, "yep still cold."

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. 🤦‍♂️

@kev Yep, that looks rough.

Fully Charged Live North America is this weekend! Excited to see a Rivian up close, and hoping to test drive/ride a few EV's and electric bikes.

As I'm wrapping up some lingering reads from 2019 I think I've settled on "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" as my first book of 2020. Somehow I haven't read it yet, but as this year's madness continues to ramp up in the US, it seems like the time is right.

If you happen to be curious what I've been reading lately I keep a book log at https://electro.pizza/bookshelf/

@Tayo Makes sense, but ya I wouldn't either.