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Territorial Turkey

(take note Canonical)

I seem to have stumbled on a turkey turf war, I wasn’t sure what I was hearing until I got close. And then again I wasn’t sure what I was seeing until from the chaos emerged 2 flocks going opposite directions. Clearly they had run into each other and weren’t having each other’s presence.

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Energy Diversification

I hate to say it, but we have hooked on to the grid. Well, we have an outlet, outside, with nothing plugged in. The house and kids are growing, we use ever more energy and I have less time to implement. We still don’t have a root cellar which would be the perfect spot to keep batteries from freezing, and would trigger our investment in a good bunch of lithium. And so until then it’s only 3 batteries keeping us going, and really they do great, but in the winter with shorter days, more cover and colder weather, we have used the generator. And so the idea with having access to the grid is to replace that, and in general having one more option to fill batteries.

I am dead worried about complacency, I really don’t like the idea that it’s right there waiting to be used and easy. In reality, the last car we bought should have been electric. We didn’t have the capacity to “fuel” one though, it would have been nice to have had the grid option then. I still very much have the intention to fuel one with the extra solar array that’s been sitting in the shed for a while now, but at least if push comes to shove, we can still get the car now and experiment with increased solar later. That is one thing about home grown solar, with change comes a transitional time of experimentation and learning lessons the hard way. Which is a bigger deal when talking about mobility (AKA me waving my hands explaining to Nicole why her car doesn’t move).

Another hard truth is that we’ll never have enough storage to run AC in the house through the night. We’ve done wonders with running it during the day, taking a cold shower in the evening, and fanning cold air in at night. If you give us a Summer like 2025 every year, no problem. Seared in our memory though is a brutal heat wave which lasted for days and offered no respite at night. We want to be better placed to tackle future heat waves, and the grid means having the option to run AC through the night.

The house is still solar and autonomous, the grid is only an extra decoupled input we can tap into when it makes sense. But we’re no longer as off grid anymore. I’m confident we’ll keep growing our array and experimenting, I’m genuinely curious about all things solar.

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Plots

I’m plotting again after an August hiatus. The new Gondola Plotter is super quiet, so nice! I’ve made a few refinements to the software stack of course… The usual.

I found a bunch of really cool engravings in some very old books I found in the abandoned house. These books are worthy of some discussion on their own much like the old vinyls, but this isn’t the time.

I got ChatGPT to make me a few SVG handling tools that are really incredibly well done and will help me shed some of the apps I was using. With SVGs there really is not a single app that does all the things, so I drag a collection around just to use 1 or 2 of their function. AI is helping me write scripts to explore algorithms and replace more trivial functionality from apps.

Case in point: this super cool recursive inset fill algorithm to turn fills into something a plotter can do.

I’ve been wanting to write this one for a while, but I knew it’d take me a good few days to nail it. That got turned into 30 minutes with AI. Jaw dropping. I love the effect as it echoes a lot of bored fillings of shapes I’d do as a kid getting bored in class. The cookstove above is filled with it, but it’s far too dense at this size and so it really looks like a actual fill rather than a particular effect.

A lot of my tooling these days is Python which has good libraries for handling SVGs. I used to dislike Python for their dumb purist move from 2.7 to 3 which wasted everyone’s time, and because they had managed to reimplement library hell. But I have to say venv is a successful redress to the later.

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Looks Like the Temp Sensor

also got EMP’d. That’s kind of crazy to think about. I suppose this isn’t the most reliable electronics but it kind of gets you thinking about what else could be affected. Or what we could lose with a closer strike.

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Thunder & Solar Monitoring

I lost a voltage sensor the exact minute thunder struck very close to the house, Nicole happened to be filming because it was an impressive mix of rain, hail & thunder. Does thunder create some sort of EMP? Could be a coincidence but the timing is really suspicious. Sorry I mean sus.

dead sensor :\

Oh, well I’ll just buy a replacement.

And fuck, I forgot we screw over allies and suck up to dictators now. Phidgets come from Canada, I never found any comparable alternatives in the realm of current sensing that goes beyond small hobbyist projects. And I don’t really want to relearn/recode a whole new deal anyway. I just want replacement parts.

Extensive searching pointed to robotshop.com having Phidgets parts in stock. So I grabbed spares for everything to get a few thunderstrikes ahead and buy me a few years. For the top 3 parts, I grabbed everything they are left.

The battery voltage sensor is actually important these days as automation uses it to make decisions on which circuits to turn on/off. So for a few days until I got the part, I moved the panels’ voltage sensor to the battery. Sensing the panels is informational and has no real consequence on function. With anything solar, I have appreciated having spares at hand so it was time to spend some money and make that true for the monitoring side of things which we became more dependent on over time.