Michael Janke

Chasing Fresh Air and Sunshine

I’ve Been Working on the Railroad …

All my live long days For a couple of weekends I’ve been working on the railroad Just to pass the time away Beause I thought it would be interesting & fun A couple weeks ago I sent an e-mail to the local railroad museum suggesting that I was interested in volunteering and wasn’t averse to…

2023-05-01
Monitoring and Message Bus Redesign

Edit: Up-to-date description of the campervans technology stack. Warning. More nerd stuff coming up. A year ago, I started monitoring various parts of the campervan using a Raspberry Pi, ESP32 microcontrollers, and the cloud based Blynk IoT framework. A short time later I added a Nextion touchscreen display: Every Camper needs a Message Bus 😀…

2023-03-20
Thoughts on the Desert Southwest

Driving the one hundred miles of uninterrupted Mojave Desert from 29 Palms to Parker I spun up a few thoughts about the southwest. I’m a cheesehead who graduated to Minnesota, so I have no ‘born-with’ knowledge or notions about the desert. I first traveled the southwest a couple of decades ago, and at the time…

2023-03-15
Tuzigoot National Monument

Note to self. Highway 89A from Prescott to Clarkdale is not a shortcut if you’re driving a nine-thousand pound dually campervan. The hint we missed was when Google maps said it was 20 miles and one hour to Cottonwood. And yep, it took an hour to go up and over that mountain. A bunch of…

2023-03-10
Joshua Trees

Hint: They aren’t actually trees. They’re a species of yucca. Joshua Tree National Park straddles the boundary between the Colorado and Mojave deserts. The east half is Colorado desert & much like southern Arizona. The west half, where the famous Joshua trees reside, is Mojave desert. You can see the transition as you drive north-south…

2023-03-08
Quartzsite, Arizona

Shortly after getting my first camper I started hearing about Quartzsite, a small town on the Arizona-California border where RV’ers spend the winter. I wasn’t sure why they came to Quartzsite so I asked Bing AI: Hi, this is Bing. I found some information about why RVers go to Quartzsite Arizona every winter. Quartzsite is…

2023-03-04