How I learned that a globally distributed multiplayer game had moved into my gateway’s coverage area, and what a game does to a shared 1,200 baud packet channel.
I’ve got a VHF/UHF transceiver radio in my garage running an APRS Internet gateway. It would transmit over the radio occasionally, usually just my own periodic beacons or the rare relay of someone else’s message from the Internet.
Surviving California’s Net Billing Tariff with dual Powerwall 3s, a Model 3, and the NetZero app.
California’s NEM 3.0 changed the math for home solar. Under the old rules, the grid acted as a giant 1:1 battery. You overproduced during the day, pushed power to PG&E, and pulled it back at night for roughly the same price.
I run a small Meshtastic mesh network out of Benicia, CA. Five nodes, a mix of fixed and mobile hardware, with the gateway publishing packets to an MQTT broker on my NAS. I wanted the telemetry - battery levels, signal quality, GPS positions, environmental sensors - flowing into InfluxDB and visualized in Grafana. This post covers how I built the pipeline and the specific problems I hit along the way.
I picked up a Ugreen DXP4800 Pro NAS earlier this year. It’s a 4-bay unit with an Intel Core i3-1315U, 10GbE + 2.5GbE LAN, and dual M.2 NVMe SSD slots. I upgraded the RAM to 2x8GB DDR5-5600 SO-DIMMs (replacing the stock single stick) for 16GB total. The i3-1315U is a chip more commonly found in laptops than NAS enclosures, which turns out to matter a lot when you want to run Plex Media Server.
The Ring smart doorbell does far more than your ordinary wired doorbell; it’s able to deliver audio & video recordings in real-time over a WiFi link connected to the Internet. When your doorbell is pressed or motion is detected, the doorbell automatically begins streaming video to the Ring servers. Ring will send a push notification to your phone and archive the video, where it can be downloaded or viewed through the Ring website or app.