I've been stalling on updates because I'm not sure where in the world to put them.
So much of my side-project life has been consumed by amateur radio over the past year, I've been thinking they deserved their own blog. But most of it is still just code or DIY hackiness that I (just today) came to the conclusion that I might as well start typing.
The first thing on my list is a weather station. A retail one, and very poorly documented at that. It's the Raddy L7 station, which I purchased for a couple of very specific reasons. First was the retailer, Radioddity, which I've had a lot of success with in the past. Second was the price, of course. But the real selling points were on the technology -- its communications design is a LoRa-based wireless one, which I have been finding growing interest in over the past couple years. There's huge potential in LoRa (which has already been realized in a select few commercial spaces), which the amateur radio world is just recently latching onto.
The whole radio and electronics world is driving me one step closer to a YouTube channel. (You've been warned.)
All that aside, I was able to do just enough reverse engineering to grab the data from the hub to rewrite the data as a more standard JSON result so I could process it into a few other applications, most notably my HomeAssistant server. Next steps here are to integrate with MQTT to drive a couple smart devices.
The second one is really a mess. It's a combination of web scraping and re-packaging tools to give me a pseudo-curated summary of the things I'm interested in. The whole objective is to get rid of the endless stream of push notifications to my cell phone and look at my daily information in a more 1980s-esque way.
Ultimately, I'm beyond fed up with the "always-on, half-dozen side hustles" never-ending drive to make us as personally efficient as possible. That shit is for manufacturing, not leisure. Leave my humanity the hell alone. I treasure my personal inefficiencies, please and thank you.
The last is a collection of amateur radio logging and calculator utilities. Sure, there are a bunch of them out there, but they're all disparate, clunky, over-and-or-under-engineered, and mostly very platform dependent. I run a combination of operating systems, and I'd really like the tools I rely on to be portable.
To that end, I've landed on node.js to handle my daily lifting. I know, Rust was probably the better choice here, but the learning curve was a bit too steep for me to get the results I wanted quickly enough. Most of these tools are partially web-enabled and database driven by nature, so it made sense to take the shortcut.
Can I just say here... I hate that radio tools have a web requirement. I would really like to see some of these intercommunicative standards re-designed to build upon the packet standards developed in the previous century.
Anyway, that's the past year in a nutshell. I've built repositories for most of the things I'm tinkering with, and when I'm comfortable with the fact that people will laugh my code off the planet, I'll make them public.
Look... It's been years since I've done any legitimate work as a developer, so getting back into any of this has been a real challenge.
