Posts

I’ve almost completed the right hand side, and the left hand side is far enough along that I can assemble the whole rover!

Progress update showing the new left hand assembly

I’ve released vedirect, a tool parses the Victron VE.Direct TEXT protocol and exports the metrics over Prometheus and MQTT. This can be used to monitor your solar installation and view statistics in tools like Grafana or Home Assistant.

I realized I haven’t posted about the current generation of nppilot, my never complete, often restarted rover project. The current version is a modified Traxxas E-Revo 1/16: Under the hood this is:

I’m using a Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB3 based SSD to host this website and other services, and as a side effect the lounge looks like a disco due to all the flashing activity LEDs.

For the last month or so I’ve been working on making my home server (which also hosts this blog!) solar powered. It’s pointless but entertaining, and this is a first of a series of posts about what I learned on the way.

I’ve started using Vouch for SSO to my personal site. Quite happy with the experience - it integrates well with Nginx, was straight forward to setup, and is straight forward to enable for different paths on the site.

A nice thing about having a 3D printer is quick fixes to small things. The 8x4 propeller that came with my Bixler 3 was loose on the motor shaft, so I 3D printed an adapter:

I recently purchased a HobbyKing Bixler 3 to use as a autopilot platform and am pretty happy with how it turned out. Both the under wing area and nose area have plenty of room and could easily fit a Pixhawk 4 Mini with GPS and telemetry.

I think it’s important to also post about the projects that didn’t turn out. Pudel was a project to automatically track and video a model plane using a cell phone camera.