As I’m sure you have noticed by now, my website is loading much faster and has a new look. After about 10 years of self hosting my website I have decided to move it to BlueHost. This was a two fold reasoning, the first is that I have limited time with my current job. I was finding it difficult to keep up maintenance while on the road all of the time. The second reason was cost, Self host was raising my power bill quite a lot, and the the cost of the Static IPs at my rural home address was just becoming too much. Plus with this new setup, faster servers, and less load on my home servers, I’ll be able to setup more projects in the coming years.

Current Projects:

I have a few current projects that I’ve been working on as I can between being on the road. The largest has been my home automation project(I’ll post more on this later). This is using Home Assistant for the Core of the system, and zigbee2mqtt for the remote device connections. I started moving much more quickly on this project as a way to better maintain my home and property while traveling for work. It’s helped quite a lot and has been a wonderful system to work with. The Home Assistant community has been very helpful and it is clear they are very dedicated.

I’ve also been playing around with Meshtastic and Ripple Radio. I’ve been messing around with these systems to build a back up comms link between my partner and myself encase the cellular system drops from due to weather or political reasons. I’m using meshtastic now, but I’ve been hitting it’s limits with stability and it’s ability to communicate over the internet or larger networks. (I need this so I can communicate with the system when I’m out of my home area). If you have any experience with with getting meshtastic to work across wide area networks please drop a comment and let me know.