📄️ A Rough Guide to Private AI: How To Buy, Build, and Use LLMs and RAGs.
For a little under $8,000 you can have your own very capable private AI at home that you can feed data to and get answers from.
📄️ A Rough Guide to the Rabbit r1
The Rabbit r1 launched to great fanfare on January 9th, but nobody I knew really understood what to use it for. It was one of those "Holy shit, that thing is rad, but..what does it do again?" moments.
📄️ An Off Grid Water Monitoring System
I got into Helium to deploy and use a LoRa Wide Area Network (you can read about that here). Along with everyone else, I then got caught up in the wild gold rush of '20-'21, deploying hotspots and earning HNT, helping clients do the same, and occasionally just looking around and wondering at the madness of it all. While that was fun, and an incredibly profitable excuse to get out into some of my favorite parts of the backcountry in San Diego, that run is over and I can finally return to the reason I found and started with this project: Sensors.
📄️ Building The Next Generation of VO2 Masks
In the early spring of 2023, I began investigating building my own VO2 mask as an amateur athlete and professional tech enthusiast. I stumbled upon directions to build one, which you can view here.
📄️ How To Measure Endangered Vernal Pool Depth Using The Helium Network
Over at Meteo Scientific (the business unit I started to run an IoT Sensor as a Service, or iSaaS), I've been working on a few projects, one of them around measuring vernal pools in the mountains.
📄️ How Wet Can Ya Get? Let's Get Muddy!
Diving deeper over at Meteo Scientific on this plant nursery project, we wanted to blast out of the gate with something we thought would be incontrovertibly useful. For a nursery in the coastal desert environment of San Diego (albeit with local micrometeorological conditions), keeping track of soil moisture in all the pots seemed like a good start.
📄️ Level Up In A Connected World Using 3D Printing
One of many extraordinary aspects of being alive in 2023 is access to resources. In this case, it was access both to a 3D printer (a Prusa Mk3S+ I assembled from the kit) and finding design talent to get maximum value of the printer. Before we get there though, let's start at the beginning.
📄️ People Counter Update: Many Obstacles, Much Learning
Way back in February of 2022, I wrote a Helium Foundation grant to deploy people counters on a trail here in San Diego. The grant was approved, I used the first tranche to buy the devices, and then ran into a series of obstacles that are common enough in this world of business, IoT, and interaction with various local governments that it's worth sharing them.
📄️ The People Counter Project: Beginnings
In less than 2 years, a group of strangers has managed to deploy 700,000+ Helium Hotspots worldwide. We've got the worlds largest contiguous wireless network built. So, uh, what do we do with it?