Tag: Technology
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Tracking Home Energy Use
A decade and a half ago I got a bit tired of hearing how ‘unplug your wall warts’ will somehow save the planet, so I spent a half a day measuring wall warts, lights, computers, electric clothes dryers and other household odds & ends. Hint: Wall warts are not the problem. I’m interested in energy…
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I Finally Bought an EV
We needed a car – one of ours died. Our goal was to find an around town car with low operating & maintenance costs. preferably lightly used and domestically manufactured. A used Chevy Bolt fit the bill. Many have had replaced and re-warrantied battery packs; they have decent range and are reasonably priced. At $0.16…
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On Northern Lights
We chased the Aurora Borealis a few weeks ago and found decent light displays – better than I’ve seen in a long time. But we were too close to the metro area to get the best view. The lights were straight overhead at times, hence the reports and photos from far to the south. In…
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The Not-Normal Way to Read Tank Gauges
OEM holding tank gauges are unreliable and inaccurate. Normal people solve this by buying Garnet’s SeeLevel sending units with the appropriate SeeLevel control panel. If they want to integrate their gauges into their camper’s monitoring system, they buy the versions with RV-C or NMEA2000 interfaces. This post was not written by a normal person.
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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 😀…
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It was supposed to be simple
I have three USB-power devices stuck to my dash or windshield – a Garmin nav, an old phone I use as an OBD-II dashboard, and a dash cam. We also sometimes need to charge our cell phones while driving. Three plus two = five USB power cords hanging off two lighter sockets, both down by…
Michael Janke 