Ye Ole Cabin - Tag - yeolecabin2024-03-28T17:39:26-06:00Joshua Griffinurn:md5:cb4dea4c2bf172d4ba0e02ece0f70755DotclearFeels like homeurn:md5:8e85cd063e23180a13eb43de86735e7c2020-01-12T17:39:00-07:002020-01-12T17:39:00-07:00JoshuaCabin LifebreadHomelovequiltingsourdoughwinterYe Ole Cabinyeolecabin <p>This place isn't just filled with silicon and electrons; it is also a warm home. Sure, there's a fire every morning and evening through the winter and there are big south facing windows that make the home feel warm, but that is not what I am talking about. I'm talking about the resident homemaker...</p>
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<p>My loving wife has been doing some crafty things lately. She has crocheted since we've been married but she mentioned in passing (once) that she might like to start quilting so... now she can. This was her very early birthday present this past year. I think I bought it in September and her birthday was December. It sat idle for a while as she was finishing up some other projects like slippers for every family member and friend as well as a "granny square" afghan for my niece. </p>
<figure><img alt="Singer-Web-01.JPG, Jan 2020" class="media" src="http://yeolecabin.com/blog/public/Home/Singer-Web-01.JPG" />
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<p>Since compeleting these other projects, she has been working on her first quilt quite dilligently. She still has more slippers on the way but she works on those while I drive. </p>
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<p>I used to cover this table in my computer stuff and now it's covered in many colors of fabric, cutting things, and thread.</p>
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<p><img alt="Kelli_Work-Web-01.JPG, Jan 2020" class="media" src="http://yeolecabin.com/blog/public/Home/Kelli_Work-Web-01.JPG" /></p>
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<p>I'm excited to see the first creation. I'm told it is called a "nine square."</p>
<p>She has also taken on sourdough bread baking. She has been making our bread for several months now but decided to start with sourdough only recently. I think the winter weather was the instigator. I make sourdough biscuits with her starter occasionally as they are handy to grab and eat but I think she has become an artisan bread maker. I had gone up the road to visit the neighbors and when I came back, this was sitting in the kitchen. It's a work of art! </p>
<figure><img alt="Sourdough-Web-01.JPG, Jan 2020" class="media" src="http://yeolecabin.com/blog/public/Home/Sourdough-Web-01.JPG" /></figure>
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<p>A house is made of four walls and a roof but the care put into it is what makes it a home. I love the smell of bread!</p>
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<p>Thank you Kelli for making us a home.</p>http://yeolecabin.com/blog/index.php?post/2020/01/12/Feels-like-home#comment-formhttp://yeolecabin.com/blog/index.php?feed/atom/comments/12Winter Is Hereurn:md5:28cef1d4622125249c868fdd2a842de32019-12-04T07:45:00-07:002020-01-12T18:39:49-07:00JoshuaCabin LifeAirplanesCabinCessna 120ColdSnowTravelWinterYe Ole Cabinyeolecabin <p>We woke up to 8 inches(ish) of snow on the ground the Tuesday morning before Thanksgiving. The wind blew hard and there was snow suck in the corners of the windows on the outside. It looked kind of dreamy, like an old painting of Christmas.</p>
<p><img src="http://yeolecabin.com/blog/public/Cabin/.Winter_Cabin_Back_s_m.jpg" alt="Winter_Cabin_Back_s.JPG, Dec 2019" title=" " /></p>
<p>I love getting snow. It messes up our road, make it extra cold, makes any outdoor activity around the house harder, freezes water lines, but it's absolutely welcome. Snow puts moisture in the ground that lasts until spring. It make our grass grow, our trees happy, and keeps the dust down. Snow make everything look cleaner when it first falls. It adds white to our red and brown landscape and that color combination is great.</p>
<p>There's more to this day's story and it really started the evening before. Here it goes.</p>
<p>If any of you know my car, you know it is beat. Old. Tired. Rough. My car is still my car and I drive it almost daily. It has 337,000 miles and has been totaled in a crash with a Polaris RZR. Still, I invest time and money in it to keep it running. Well, Monday night I was headed home from work in the rain. I was traveling south on the highway when someone crossed over a concrete median and pulled in front of me. I was unable to stop in time and rear-ended them. It wasn't a hard collision but it was still a collision. We get a police report and I drive home. On the way home, my oil pressure light starts flickering, one of the belts squeaks occasionally, and I see some steam coming out from under my hood. That's no good. I tried to open the hood but am unable to because the hood has been pushed down so I can't get to the latch. I make it home without overheating and park the car.</p>
<p>The next day, Kelli and I stay home for a snow day. I don't have anything productive on my schedule and we start thinking about our collapsing Thanksgiving plans. We planned to drive my car to Phoenix for Thanksgiving but that idea was now out the window after a front end collision. That was already Plan B as Plan A was to fly down on Wednesday but that got canned because the weather was supposed to deteriorate on Wednesday making flying unsafe. So as we sat drinking coffee in front of the fire, we came up with Plan C; fly to Phoenix NOW. The weather was good after the snow storm (though cold) and the weather forecast looked very favorable for the return trip on Sunday. We quickly packed some clothes, fed the cat, and headed to the airport in our friend's JEEP (Kelli's car needs an engine.)</p>
<p>We leave the Moab airport around noon in the frigid cold with snow on the ground over Canyonlands National Park. My airplane currently does not have a heater so we were bundled up and had a blanket over us as well. Our fuel stop along the way was Williams, AZ. We got gas, stretched, warmed up, and got a skosh of coffee. Another hour of flying and we landed in Wickenburg.</p>
<p>I checked on our house via our website and the temperatures were dropping fast inside. In our rush to leave I didn't fire up the propane heater or drain the hot water heater so I started getting nervous. I texted one of my friendly neighbors and he agreed to turn off our well pump and drain the hot water heater. That put my mind at ease. The entire time we were gone, the house inside temperature didn't fall below 45 degrees.</p>
<p>It rained while we were in Phoenix but cleared up the next day. We spent some good time with family I hadn't seen in a long time. As Friday rolled around, I discussed with Kelli the possibility of leaving a day early to head home as the weather looked favorable.</p>
<p>Saturday morning my parents dropped us off at the Wickeburg airport. We didn't add any fuel before departure since we had only burned an hour of fuel and would burn an hour heading back to Williams. That leaves us with 1.5 hours of fuel when we land. This flight was colder than the flight down. The last storm laid down more snow and we didn't have the sun coming through the windshield so we could see our breath the whole flight. About three miles from the Williams airport I realized we weren't landing there. I flew low over the runway to fine two feet of snow covering everything. We diverted to Flagstaff as it was close and was a lager airport with more services. I figured they would have the runway plowed and clean. When listening to weather as we were about ten miles out, there was a note that the runway was closed for snow and ice removal. I had a quick chat with the tower and quickly decided to divert to another airport. Sedona was next closest and close was important.</p>
<p>I heard a helicopter on the radio in Sedona and asked him how the runway was. He said it was clear; good news. We landed in Sedona with a little less than an hour of fuel left. After getting the cheapest full-service fuel in the country and a splash of coffee, we made the long trek back to Moab. A cold and uneventful flight later, we hobbled out of the plane at my home airport with cold feed and full bladders.</p>
<p>We made it to the house more than an hour before sunset. First course of action was to start a fire. There was some more snow on ground from after we left but it was compacted from warm weather and sunshine. I turned on the well pump and everything flowed just fine.</p>
<p>The house warmed up quickly. The cat got some cuddles and food. Winter is here and I like it.</p>
<p>Stay warm,
Joshua</p>http://yeolecabin.com/blog/index.php?post/2019/12/04/Winter-Is-Here2#comment-formhttp://yeolecabin.com/blog/index.php?feed/atom/comments/10Ye Ole (Techy) Cabin Part Iurn:md5:3b4b1b76aed430c995244464442dad862019-08-12T00:03:00+01:002020-01-05T23:20:04+00:00JoshuaTechnologyDIYIOTMQTTTechnologyweb developmentyeolecabin <p>I'm going to start with a three part series on my solar and atmosphere data collection setup. I talk to a lot of people about it (whether they want to hear it or not) so I figured this would be a good place to start a new blog. This setup is the culmination of 1.5 years of learning for me. It started when my wife purchased me a Raspberry Pi to build a weather station back in December of 2017. I started to learn how to code with the materials that came with the pi and soon realized the Sense Hat that came with the Pi wouldn't do it for me. In my search for a solution I came across Arduino and eventually the ESP8266. Since then I have learned some Arduino, Python, assembly code, and web development. The weather station still hasn't fully come to fruition but it will make it someday. I hope you are able to learn something along the way about electrical engineering, coding, or web development.</p>
<h3>Part I</h3>
<h4>An Overview</h4>
<p>Here's a rundown of how my home system is setup. <img alt="Solar_outline.JPG" src="http://yeolecabin.com/blog/public/Tech/Solar_outline.JPG" title="Solar_outline.JPG, Aug 2019" /></p>
<p>The heart of my IOT system is the Raspberry Pi. It is the MQTT broker, wireless access point, database server, local web server, and it runs my scripts to keep everything organized.</p>
<h5>What is a Raspberry Pi?</h5>
<p>A Raspberry Pi is not edible contrary to popular opinion. A Pi (for short) is a small computer that runs on a linux operating system. It's pretty cheap at $35. It's highly versatile with today's models offering wifi and bluetooth built-in. It also sports HDMI, USB (duh), Ethernet, 3.5mm audio, and GPIO ports. GPIO is general purpose input/output. These ports are simple pins you can turn on or off, read data from, send data through, and many other cool things.</p>
<h5>What is IOT?</h5>
<p>Generally, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things" target="_blank"> IOT (Internet of Things)</a> is the interconnection of physical things, computers, and the internet. IOT is Alexa turning on your kitchen light when you tell her to. It's your refrigerator sending you an alert if you leave the door open. It's the fancy new camera doorbells that allow you to see who's on your front porch while you are on vacation in Uzbekistan. IOT is that potentially scary thing that is connecting everything and everyone through the internet. That's another post though.</p>
<h5>What is MQTT?</h5>
<p><a href="http://mqtt.org/" target="_blank">MQTT</a> is a lightweight communication protocol to share information to IOT devices. It is often called a pub/sub messaging protocol. What happens is a device (ie. temperature sensor) "publishes" a temperature under a topic (ie home/outdoor/temperature). The MQTT broker takes that data and stores it. If any other device is "subscribed" to that topic, the broker sends the data to that device. Pretty handy protocol.</p>
<h5>Moving On</h5>
<p>With all that out of the way, let's explain that picture above. The computer thing on the right is the Pi. It collects data wirelessly from other sensors around the house. Each sensor is connected to a separate small computer called a microcontroller. A microcontroller doesn't run an operating system, it just turns on and runs a single program. So each microcontroller periodically collects some data, sends it to the Pi, then the Pi stores that data in a database. Cool! we have data! But now we want to look at that data. What next? Looking at data like this isn't very appealing: <img alt="query.jpeg" src="http://yeolecabin.com/blog/public/Tech/query.jpeg" title="query.jpeg, Aug 2019" /></p>
<p>So then I attached a small screen to a microcontroller, subscribed to every topic, and displayed the data as numbers. It was better but I could only see it at the house and it didn't show me trend. That same screen is still running and is useful to see how charged the batteries are or if it is cooler outside than inside so I can decide whether to open the windows or not. I wanted to view the data on my cell phone, however, and I wanted to see the data on shiny, interactive graphs. So that takes us to my last hurdle in this setup... web development.</p>
<h5>Web Development (a.k.a. making it shiny)</h5>
<p>Now, I know the least about web development of the three subjects here. One look at my website today and you can see that. I'm on my way to getting better and have at least accomplished my mission thus far. I set out to host my own website from the same Pi that does everything else at the house and got everything set up. I installed the NGINX server, PHP, MySQL, purchased a domain name, did all that other weird network stuff, write an index page and.... I could never view it outside my local network. As I dug a little I discovered that my satellite internet provider doesn't allow server hosting through them. Then I purchased a hosting service through namecheap and here we are. I now pay a little for a domain name and some space on a giant corporation's server. After pulling my hair out for days and driving my wife crazy, I learned just enough PHP, HTML, and javascript to display all this wonderful data on some nice graphs you can see at <a href="http://yeolecabin.com" target="_blank">yeolecabin.com</a>.</p>
<h5>Concluding</h5>
<p>There's a rundown. Almost nothing I did is "off the shelf." It hasn't been as fast or probably even as cheap as purchasing a pre-made kit but it has been a fun journey and now I have a skill set that will serve me for years to come. Stay tuned for Part II where I dig into the hardware that makes things possible. I will get more nerdy in the next episode.</p>
<p>Joshua @ Ye Ole Cabin</p>http://yeolecabin.com/blog/index.php?post/2019/08/12/Ye-Ole-%28Techy%29-Cabin-Part-I#comment-formhttp://yeolecabin.com/blog/index.php?feed/atom/comments/3