Ahoy, and welcome aboard.
Set a spell, and I’ll tell you a yarn or two about the projects I’ve created — and occasionally screwed up — in the pursuit of building real systems that do real work, and often run off-grid. Hardware that holds up to dirt, weather, and wear. Code that talks to sensors, radios, power systems, and sometimes vehicles.
You’ll find:
Raspberry Pi systems doing real work in harsh, messy environments
Practical electronics: from CAN bus hacking to soil sensors
Radios, SDRs, embedded Linux, and resilient automation
Tools built for autonomy, not vendor lock-in
Documentation, schematics, and code — because ownership and agency starts with understanding
And yeah, sometimes I talk about art and other stuff.
If you’d rather fix than replace, write your own tools, or build systems that don’t need the cloud to function — you’re in the right place.
So walk the list. Skim, dive in, or get lost in the rabbit hole. It’s all here.
General Stuff
28-Aug-25 — Because ‘shit happens’ is not a strategy
For the Glory of God
14-Jun-25— The art that we create.Kicking Zeus's ass
20-Jul-25 — Dealing with power spikes and lightning strikes.
Farmsteading
Distance from Disorder
26-Jun-24 — Why and how we moved to Arkansas.Be Water, My Friend
01-May-24 — Our first irrigation project at Stella Porta.The Great Pumpkin Patch Pump
07-May-24 — Pumpkin Patch Irrigation project.Rural Internet
08-May-24 — Solar-powered Wi-Fi, StarLink, and Cameras.The Guest House
10-May-24 — Southern Hospitality.This is My Dirt
20-May-24 — The Farmsteading Adventure Begins.Not Another Sprinkler Valve Article; TLDR
2-Sep-25 — The elevator pitch
Amateur Radio
Hamming it Up
23-May-24 — Adventures in Amateur Radio.Friggin in the Riggin
30-May-24 — Adventures in Maritime and Aviation radio.Mayday…
04-Jun-24 — The Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS).
Search and Rescue
Rescue Me
12-Jun-24 — Adventures in Search and Rescue.Woofing in the Woods
17-Jun-24 — Training as a rescue medical professional.The M part of March
19-Jun-24 — Tourniquet use and training.Thunderstruck
24-Jun-24 — More than you wanted to know about lightning, much more!
Raspberry Pi Internet of Things Project
A series of real-world farm automation hacks using Raspberry Pi, from sensors to security.
Farm automation made easy as Pi
01-May-25 — Setting up the foundation for real-world IoT on the farm.Controlling the Irrigation Valves
01-May-25 — The basics of switching solenoids, safely and reliably.Reading from the 1-Wire Sensors
06-May-25 — Building the temperature sensing layer.Using the I2C Protocol to Communicate to Sensors
07-May-25 — How we wired it, read it, and filtered out the crap.Reading Environmental Data with I2C
09-May-25 — Expanding the sensor net and interpreting the data.Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head
26-May-25 — Detecting precipitation (and making decisions from it).More I/O
30-May-25 — Handling expansion and GPIO overload.Getting the Data and Controlling the Devices from the REST API
01-Jun-25 — Talking to your Pi from across the network.Writing Your Own Device Plug-ins
03-Jun-25 — Custom code to extend your system’s reach.Using Software Devices to Build on the Hardware
06-Jun-25 — Simulated devices and logic layers.How to Make Things Happen Automatically
07-Jun-25 — Trigger-based actions and logic chains.Time Has Come Today
12-Jun-25 — Scheduled tasks and automation routines.There Are Always Conditions to Evaluate
13-Jun-25 — Conditional logic for smarter systems.Rolling My Own I²C and 1-Wire Interface Card
21-Jun-25 — A custom hardware solution for real-world reliability.Recording and Accessing Environmental Data Remotely
01-Jul-25 — Logging and remote access to your system’s mind.Preventing Injection Attacks to the Database
07-Jul-25 — Keeping bad guys out of your Pi.PWM: A Better Way to Control Sprinkler Valves
21-Jul-25 — Fine-tuned voltage control for water flow.
PiCar – Raspberry Pi Car Radio Project
An adventure in Software Defined Radio and vehicle information systems.
Why Would Anyone Sane Do This?
26-Jul-22 — The origin story of a homebrew car radio.The Hardware
27-Jul-22 — Displays, knobs, GPS, USB madness, and what’s inside the dash.1-Wire Temperature Sensors
29-Jul-22 — Monitoring in-car temperature with simple sensors.An Overview of the Software
02-Aug-22 — A look at the Python-based software stack running the show.GPS: Or Where the Heck Are We?
03-Aug-22 — Positioning, timing, and geeking out with satellites.Can You Hear Me Now?
04-Aug-22 — Making sound work on a Pi in a car (spoiler: it’s not easy).Software Defined Radio
06-Oct-22 — Exploring SDR with real-world reception on the road.Who Ate All the CPU?
01-Oct-22 — Performance profiling, multitasking, and thermal madness.Play That Funky Music
15-Oct-22 — How PiCar handles music playback from multiple sources.
Additional Resources
Bonus Hardware Projects
CAN Bus & Hacking Your Car Network
An adventure in decoding, interfacing, and controlling your vehicle with a Raspberry Pi.
OBD vs. CAN Bus
15-Mar-22 — Explaining the differences between On-Board Diagnostics and Controller Area Networks.Connecting Raspberry Pi to CAN
16-Mar-22 — How to get your Raspberry Pi speaking CAN with real car hardware.Reverse Engineering CAN Packets
17-Mar-22 — Sniffing, decoding, and making sense of the binary jungle on your car's network.Writing Code to Talk to CAN
19-Mar-22 — Sending, receiving, and scripting interactions with your vehicle's subsystems.OBD and Older Cars
21-Mar-22 — Talking to legacy vehicles that speak a different dialect.
Digital Privacy
A crypto-realist’s view of escaping walled gardens and regaining control.
Leaving the Apple Ecosystem
One man’s walk out of the orchard, in five increasingly radical steps.
We’ve Got to Get Ourselves Back to the Garden
22-Sep-23— Rethinking trust, freedom, and the cost of convenience.Time to Monkey Around with It
25-Sep-23 — Exploring GrapheneOS and DIY mobile sanity.The Day-to-Day Apps
27-Sep-23 — Messaging, photos, maps, and the rest of your digital life.The Unplugged Phone
25-Oct-24 — Navigating mobile life with no SIM, no Google, and no leash.Better Privacy Through Proton
29-Apr-25 — Proton Mail, Proton Drive, and reclaiming your data.
We Have Always Been at War with Cryptography
24-Feb-20 — Why governments love control, and math doesn’t care.
Raspberry Pi Client/Server topics
Building secure and flexible RESTful communication between farm devices.
Giving your Raspberry Pi a REST
11-Feb-22 — The core code behind many of my Pi Projects.Server Code
11-Feb-22 — Writing the brain of the operation in fast, clean Python.Client Authentication
13-Feb-22 — Trusting the client without trusting the network.Debugging REST with PAW
17-Feb-22 — Inspecting, poking, and prodding your REST endpoints
SQLite for your Raspberry Pi
02-Mar-22 — A lightweight database that punches way above its weight on embedded systems.Preventing SQLite Injection Attacks
03-Mar-22 — How to keep malicious actors out of your Pi’s local database.
Other Raspberry Pi Topics
Older projects - Home/Farm Automation
Really Older Stuff
Silent Text - from Wayback Machine
Silent Text Design Notes (GitHub)