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It has been soooo long since I wrote….

So much has changed since I’ve written.  

Old house, sold. 

New house – not telling where…

Work Camping in Wyoming – also not telling where, except near Yellowstone NP.

I’m on my fifth or sixth AI project.  

And a surgery, seems successful, no two surgeries.

New freshwater system for our RV

Is that enough? 

Wow, my last blog post was December 2024.  Yikes.  We were in Arizona for the winter.  Then back home to Illinois to downsize more junk out of the house.  Then to Texas, Hill Country to camp host for the winter.  It was different.  Not a lot to do on our free time besides the National Museum of the Pacific War.  All the land there looks the same – scrub, hills, creeks, rivers (that flood!).  They seriously flooded the year before (Kerrville) and  they flooded this year too.

We spent the summer at D and W RV campground near Champaign, while we worked as hard as we could getting our old house ready to sell.  70+ years of life, nearly 50 years of marriage, collecting “stuff”.  By stuff I mean, knickknacks, hobby leftovers, business residue (I deleted easily a million photographs left over from out photography business), old equipment we couldn’t sell for any meaningful amount.. 

And we never completely finished what we intended to do.  But the house is sold (to our son), so we at least, get to store some of our stuff there until we have another house to move it to.

We had planned to leave after the closing and head to Wyoming to help camp host at a campground our daughter and son in law were managing.  But then the “wouldn’t it be nice to have a home?” bug began to bite and before we knew it, were deep into house hunting mode.  But aren’t you leaving town? You say?  Yes.  Our first offer and a place was rejected and we missed out.  Then we found a different condo, which frankly was a bit more than we needed, but checked all our boxes and provides some flexibility for the future.  We had to navigate a remote closing, but with all our team pitching in, at the end of July, we  closed on our new home.  

In the midst of it all, we each had a surgery and multi-week recovery – that somewhat delayed our heading out to Wyoming.  My surgery required almost zero lifting afterward, so lugging those 5 gallon fresh water jugs out of the store and into the RV wasn’t possible.  We temporarily switched to 1-gallon jugs, which prompted me to think about our freshwater situation.  I found a compact, three cartridge filter that would fit in my water bay and found a 12 gallon per minute UV whole house sanitizer.  That’s a bit overkill for an RV where we are talking 2-3 gallons per minute flow maximum.  But we are a bit paranoid when it comes to our drinking water.  And it gets worse.  I conceived of a way of connecting everything so I could flip some valves and run the water coming from the pedestal through the filter and UV on the way to the freshwater tank, then flip the valves back and filter again as water is pumped from the freshwater tank to the various RV uses.  More details will follow at some point – I want to make a few hose connection changes before publishing pictures.  In the meantime, it works, we are happy with our water and no lugging huge water bottles to and from grocery stores.  No storing two 5-gallon jugs in the way in the RV.  Not bringing 10 gallons a week into the RV changes our use model a bit.  We don’t go as many days between fill-ups, but then we don’t boondock much either.

While we were in Texas, we switched from the old model 2 Starlink to the new Mini.  The old one was mounted on the original stand, stuck to the roof with magnets bonded to the fiberglass RV roof.  It had to be taken down on travel days.  For the new one, I designed and manufactured a mount that could either lay flat or angle up.  It also rotates to match Starlink’s preferred direction.  So, on travel days, I set it flat, but when we stop for a period of time, I pop it up and rotate it in the correct direction.  Oh, and I incorporated a hail proof cover for it at the same time.  No more raising and lowering a heavy Starlink pus stand and no trips up to the roof on travel days..

AI is everything, right?  I started using various AI tools for research.  Then quickly moved to Claude Code for developing applications.  I have to say, the results are amazing.  Not only can it write code amazingly fast, but it can also do the research required to implement protocols that would take me literally days, if not weeks.  I’m two web sites and 5 projects into development and I’m building(we are building) apps I could never dream of doing alone.

One of my projects was a panorama program for my Seestar S50 telescope.  A long, long time ago I built two different panorama cameras. One just used 8 cameras to simultaneously shoot images that could stitch into a 360 degree image.  The other one used a microprocessor and some servos to shoot a multi-row set of images that could be stitched together.  Both were pretty crude.  Eventually I purchased a Gigapan unit and created a number of very high resolution, very high pixel count images.  So, I got the idea – why can’t I do this with my telescope?  It has all the mechanics, just not the software.  I wrote Seestar and asked if they were going to implement it.  Nope.  Dwarf implemented it on their scope.  I didn’t want to stitch on the telescope; I just wanted to take the pictures and stitch them on my computer.  

So, Claude Code and I sat down, brain-stormed and developed a Mac application that could control the scope.  There were a few Gotcha moments, but Claude found work arounds.  When I was able to shoot my first test panorama, it stitched fine, or so I thought.  My second test had some blue sky and I could see vertical lines.  After consulting with the panorama software company, he realized that each image out of the scope had 5% or so of the left edge slightly brightened.  No way to fix that in the scope, so in 30 minutes, Claude Code and I built a separate App that simply trimmed off that edge and then stitching worked fine.  That panorama software seriously would have taken days for me to do it by hand.  AI is coming, no it’s here.  Learn to use it in whatever capacity you can or be left behind.

Ok, I’ll try not to wait so long next time.

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So, November is two-thirds gone.  We are somewhere in Arizona.  I’m not saying where because my crazy family seems to want to know.  We’ve been in this campground for over a month and should be through the end of the year.  It’s getting colder – hopefully January we will be somewhere a bit warmer.  The bedroom slide is still “maybe”.  We went in for an oil change on the almost 10-year-old truck and came out with a newish 2024 truck.  Well, it took a week or so to get it delivered, etc.

Projects abound as usual.  And as if that wasn’t enough, we took the truck in for an oil change and ended up buying a new truck.  Old Blue was fast approaching 10 years old and there was a pretty good sale on end of season 2024 models.  We got basically the same truck with all the new bells and whistles.  We are still “remote sorting” out the title and registration transfers with the home state.  And there were all the customizations we did with Blue that we needed to get done, again.  I ordered Roadmaster tow mounts and taillight wiring.  With this truck at least, Ford left a connector in the engine compartment for hooking up to taillights.  One of the few things they did to make the process easy.  Phil and I took a serious look (started even) at installing the tow mounts ourselves – but I chose to call in the a mobile RV tech to help.  In order to install the mounts, much of the front plastic and bumper have to be removed.  Our tech had done it before and he was willing to let us work on it all with him, saving time and money.  I rarely pay to get this kind of work done, but in this case, I think it was money well spent.

But it was only the beginning.  We run a front and rear dash cam.  We install 2 magnetic phone charger mounts, plus a GMRS radio.  And, or course, the RVBrake needed the breakaway switch wire and power to operate.  I search and searched for a way to attach to an appropriate fuse for battery and accessory power and finally gave up.  Ford simple doesn’t make it easy unless you buy one of the high-end trucks with upfitter switches and circuits pre-installed.  Thus, I gathered up wire, a good quality relay, a fuse circuit tap, a couple of in-line fuses, a bunch of split wrap and a handful of tie-wraps.  I pulled ignition signal via a fuse tap, and used it to operate a relay to provide 12V to all the accessories (each with its own appropriate fuse).  I ran all the wire plus the antenna cable for the radio across the engine compartment and through the firewall together, then distributed as needed.  I put a 12 volt plus USB distribution box on the side of the center console, passenger side to split out power for everything except the RVBrake which gets straight from battery 12V.

Add in seat covers, floor mats, under rear seat storage organizer, bed cover, and mud flaps.  Enough is enough!!  We do like the truck and are still learning all the new tech.  It’s a nice truck.  Lots of electronic enhancements.  Oh, so quiet plus some self driving abilities.

Well, there is one more.  Ok, two… we put a plastic rock chip protector on the hood.  This was from Weathertech.  The instructions said to wash the hood, then wipe down the area that would be covered with an included solvent.  The idea was to remove any wax before attaching the protector with VHB tape.  The problem was, our truck had been coated with a special coating (Permaplate).  The solvent attacked the coating, causing it to peel up.  I bitched to Weathertech and got “gee, we are sorry but that’s life” response.  I was not happy but the protector covered up the ruined coating.  So beware of any product that wants you to “apply a cleaner” so their tape sticks better.  I assumed it was just alcohol but contained four much worse solvents.

While worrying about rock chips (Blue did have some chips, but we don’t really know if they were from being towed or just driving).  We first made a decision to add a full-width rock guard on the back of the RV – ordered one, then went “geesh!, the damn thing weighs 60+ pounds and that is before I would have to buy an 8-foot piece of angle iron and various bits of mounting hardware.  We took a good look at our existing RV mud flaps (to short, too narrow) and chose to cut up the rock guard we bought and use pieces to replace the RV’s mud flaps.  We ended up using about half of the ordered rock guard with no extra hardware.

Other misc….  I installed a small thermostat and three ultra-quiet fans to cool the electronics space behind the bedroom TV.  Between Starlink and the Pepwave router and the sun on the outside of the RV it gets quite warm.  The thermostat died, leaving the compartment to get warm and the Pepwave to start rebooting every few minutes.  I hot-wired the fans then installed a fourth fan to blow directly on the Pepwave and all is well.  I have ordered another thermostat and will be cleaning up all the wiring in that cabinet soon.

Janessa and I’ve made some progress on the telescopes.  Got mine almost working in every way.  We used her Dwarf II to take some deep sky picts as well as some panoramas of the Grand Canyon.