It’s been a while since I wrote something about the bikes. Not much has really happened since we moved to Hilo, but I’m now back to doing some stuff on the NC30. It really started before we moved. I mentioned back in the post that I was going to replace the nonstandard headlight in the …
I know there haven’t been a lot of updates recently, I kind of lost momentum on the writeups. However, it’s not that things haven’t been happening. The work on the house continues. It seems that most of the things we’ve done so far has to do with water. Maybe that’s just how it is living …
I’ve been thinking of getting a welder for a while now, it seems like one of these “generally useful” things. Finally, I bit the bullet, read a bunch of online reviews, and ordered an AlphaTig 200X TIG welder. This is pretty much the cheapest TIG welder you can get that can weld Aluminum, and while …
Another not-so-exciting improvement accomplished while my Dad was here was the replacement of the old gutters on the garage. They were of the semicylindrical, thin-metal kind and were sagging and leaking in several places. The metal itself was sufficiently corroded that replacing the whole thing seemed like the best option. (Not to mention that we …
The house apparently never had a range hood. As someone who’d never seen a kitchen without a range hood until I moved to the U.S., this baffles me. Like there isn’t enough grease and crap that coats everything in the kitchen even with one. In any case, it had been on our list to install …
It’s been a while since the last update, where we had started to demolish the next room, but it is not for lack of activity. The concrete floor has been ground using the same machine from Home Depot that we used in the previous room. This floor was in better shape in that it’s not …
I said I would do a little writeup of the software for the weather station earlier, and I realized that it would actually be good to do a little How-To about using an Xbee to wirelessly upload now software to an Arduino. While I’ll include a bit of explanation along the way, there will be …
Continue reading ‘How-To: Arduino Wireless Bootloading using XBees’ »
In the previous post I talked about making the antenna for the weather station. Now, what’s that antenna connected to? An XBee-only solution? The initial iteration, that I talked about in the first post, was to just hook up analog humidity and temperature sensors to the XBee’s analog inputs. However, I had trouble getting the …
Once things happen, they happen quickly! After getting the county permits, it took ProVision 3 days to get here to start work, and 1.5 days to finish the install. The first day they pulled the wires from the meter to the new subpanel in the garage in a long, snaking conduit going under the eaves …
Continue reading ‘Going solar #3 – in business, just in time’ »
As I mentioned in the previous post, we are getting solar. There is a substantial amount of paperwork associated with this. Net metering agreement First you need to be approved by HELCO, the utility, for net metering. As I mentioned in the first post, this can be a bit iffy since, depending on where you …