DIY

Trying to figure out how my heat pump supposedly supports WiFi... in unfathomable and non-standard ways. It's available as an access point, I can associate and ping it, but no TCP ports listen and no UDP port responds. Nothing cool, undocumented features down to the rocky bottom. When you buy a heat pump and plan to automate its use, check out supported protocols before making a decision. :)

Planning on building a small anemometer and open sourcing as much of it as possible. A small bering holding a rotator and a magnet with a reed switch is how im planning on measuring the rotations. Then it will be hard wired from there to a base station with an old raspberry pi that i have and a small display for recent data. Ill need to update the pi if i want wifi so i can stream data to a server constantly but this seems like a good start, upgrades can be made later.

To answer my own question, a couple things. Today my wife and I mounted two cat shelves to give our boys a way to get to a high and inaccessible place - my wife got a couple of carpet squares from her workplace and glued them onto two shelves, which we mounted today.

i also recently built a really basic compost bin. baby steps, right?