Nothing says "country living" like a woodshed that is also a solar powered EV charging station.

This supports OCPP, which seems to be unusual in the home EVSE space and makes it very flexible. I did consider OpenEVSE, but needed L1 and current OpenEVSE kits are L2 only.

Amusingly though, I'm not using that capability, I will probably just use these simple things I sniffed from its web interface:

x=0 # 0=on, 1=off
curl 'http://uc_evse.lan/pageEvent' -X POST --data-raw "evseEnabled=$x"
curl 'http://uc_evse.lan/pageEvent' -X POST --data-raw "currentSet=$n"

bought a grizz-e mini #EVSE and I can finally start/stop charging and set charging amps at home, from the command line, without involving cloud API rate limit nonsense

Continuing my advent of hauling gravel up the hill to fill solar ground mounts

I remember when git plumbing seemed like a good idea, but the current reality is more like actual plumbing. Is this NPT or JIC, and is there an undocumented support for C-style quotation? The last plumber to touch it was in 2009 and they were just throwing together whatever parts were on hand.

man, git is totally infested with DOS-style CFLF stripping when it reads filenames from stdin. Just not enough infested to be consistent.

Use -z if you can is my only advice.

Finished bringing up the first part of my ground mount array.

It turned out to not be too hard to get the panels installed in the Powerracks, only needed a few inches of movement to align things and that was doable without help. I think it's a good system.

wow, this turned out to be an out of date /etc/hosts data (somehow set by networkmanager) plus a misunderstanding of address= in dnsmasq.conf which combined to make another local host respond to a ping of the car when the car was not at home

full egg on my face here: this turns out to be my home automation turning it off despite it not being home

I thought I had protected against this by pinging the car but apparently that doesn't work

good old testing in production!

Citrumelo harvest at Dad's

Frogging

had to write a shell script to make my car keep restarting charging since it fails out every half hour or so. grid power wtf?

Onward thru the climate sacracrifice zone

incredibly civilized for Johnson City to have a DC fast charger a block from 3 cafes and downtown.

it is a pie shelf, right?

Dumped the house battery into the car, put the pie in the built-in pie shelf and set off... Could have made it to Asheville, but stopped on the other side of the mountains to charge and have some surprisingly fun food.

Have you ever walked through a forest in autumn and wondered if those acorns crunching underfoot could be turned into something delicious? With a bit of know-how, these wild treasures can be transformed into versatile acorn flour for pancakes, tortes, and more!

I attended an excellent workshop yesterday at our local library on that very topic and could tell that Austin Cannon was speaking from personal experience. I thought you might enjoy seeing and reading the highlights.

Step 1: Gather acorns

While you can pick up acorns in the woods, Austin instead recommended looking for park situations where lawns are maintained below the trees. That makes it easy to gather the nuts (and also helps you compete with squirrels).

You’ll want to identify what type(s) of oaks you’re gathering so you can separate your haul. Species in the white oak group have rounded lobes — Chestnut Oaks are a great example with big acorns. Species in the red oak group have pointy-tipped lobes and include Red, Black, Scarlet, and Pin Oaks, among others.

White-oak-group acorns need to be processed or frozen immediately since they’ll begin to sprout in a matter of days. Red-oak-group acorns can be checked over (see the next section), dried, then stored in a rodent-proof location like a metal trashcan at room temperature for up to four years.

Step 2: Assess the quality of your acorns

The next step is to take a look at your acorns and toss any that are no good. Start with a float test — dump your harvest into a bucket of water, then discard any acorns that float to the top immediately since they have likely been infested by insects. One caveat, though: droughts can make perfectly good acorns float. So if most of your harvest rises to the top, it’s worth cutting a few open (see the next section) to make sure you’re not throwing out perfectly good nuts.

Another test is the cap test. If the cute little acorn cap is still affixed to the top of your nut, toss that acorn out. These are generally nuts that have been aborted by the tree and are not fully formed.

Once you start shelling the acorns (next step!) you might want to refer back to the collage above since I’ve labelled a fw other problematic signs to look out for.

Step 3: Shelling acorns safely

When you’re ready to start the multi-week process of turning acorns into flour, take some of your red-oak-group acorns out of storage or partially defrost your white-oak-group acorns by letting them sit on the counter for a few hours. Then you can decide how you’ll get the shell off.

A hammer works on acorns just like it does on walnuts. However, Austin prefers a quieter method: cutting each acorn in half longwise with pruning shears.

Caution: this can be dangerous! To save your fingers, put the acorn into the shears then remove your fingers before squeezing the handle.

Either way, you’ll have to peel off the shell next. This is really simple with red-oak-group acorns since they’ve been dried for storage and often fall right out. With white-oak-group acorns, you can use a nut pick, a corkscrew, a knife, or even your fingers to separate the meat from the husk.

One of our workshop participants bought his kindergarten-age daughter and she did a pretty good job prying out nut meats. So apparently child labor works too.

Step 4: Grinding acorns into meal

The next step is the easiest (as long as you own a blender). Put your shelled acorn halves into the blender, add water to a bit above them, then blend.

The goal is to create something with a smoothie consistency. Don’t blend too fine or leaching (the next step) will be problematic. You’re going for a fine meal rather than a flour. This step should only take a minute or so.

Now pour your blended-up acorns into a canning jar or other container. Leave enough room to add about twice as much water as acorn slurry. You’ve already begun:

Step 5: Leaching out tannins

The reason we’re not all nibbling on acorn muffins daily is because the nuts are full of chemicals that really mess us up, notably tannic acids and phytic acids. Both taste bitter, which is our taste buds’ warning that we shouldn’t ingest them. Luckily, all it takes is water and time to take these problematic chemicals out.

The easiest (but also slowest) leaching method is to let the acorn slurry sit in water for roughly two weeks (white oak group) or three weeks (red oak group). You need to change the water at least twice daily during this period by carefully pouring off the liquid on top then refreshing it. During that time, tannic and phytic acids will naturally seep into the water and be discarded.

You’ll know your acorn mush is done when it no longer tastes bitter. As I mentioned, this takes a while! You can speed the process up by having a higher proportion of water to acorn or by changing the water more than twice a day. Alternatively, you can speed up the process using wood-ash lye or heat, but I’ll let you read up on those alternative methods elsewhere.

Step 6: Storing and cooking with acorn flour

Once your acorn flour is no longer bitter, it’s time to strain more of the water out by pouring the acorn mush into a cloth bag and squeezing. Then you can either use the mush right away, freeze it wet, or spread it on a cookie sheet to dry before storing at room temperature. (This last method is best for baking that requires good measurements.)

We didn’t, unfortunately, get to taste any of the leached acorn goodness at the workshop I attended, so I can’t comment on that part of the process. Overall, though, turning acorns into food looked less active-time-consuming than I’d expected, although the two-to-three-week wait definitely means that if you start today you can’t have acorn pancakes for Thanksgiving!

<p>The post How to turn wild acorns into edible flour first appeared on WetKnee Books.</p>

nice day just hanging out, enjoying the sun, and when I get a little bored, running another wheelbarrow of gravel up the hill

Just finished filling the second one, which means I'm 1/10th done with this project already

My first month of charging my electric car #offgrid from 4.5 kw of solar. About how I expected it to go. I did start low after a road trip, and was able to dig out of that hole, only DC charging once to get home after a day trip.

Hoping to get above 80% before I leave for thanksgiving, but we'll see. December will probably involve more charging away from home, until I complete the rest of my upgrades.

started the next phase of my #solar install

It did work on the first try though!

Definitely gonna tune it to not bother starting when the house battery is not full and less than 1kw is being produced though.

spotting all the bugs in this code left an an exercise to the reader I suppose, but my favorites so far have been:

* minutes actually start at 0 don't they? my FRP represenation of a minute hand was actually buggy and started at 1
* this stopped the car from charging when it is not at home too, which would be a bit surprising

Finally sat down today and wrote some code for controlling my EV to charge when there is enough #offgrid solar power.

full snowglobe out the windows AND 3 kw from the solar fence? yes please

Not uncommon for modern large MPPTs to use 50 watts when idle. These 4 Epever Tracer's use < 10 watts combined.

by the way, these Tracer MPPTs have kind of a reputation as not great, and indeed they track a bit slowly and are underpowered compared with modern gear. But they're also *silent* and consume very little standby power.

My first one has been running for 7 years without any problems, so I decided to buy more.

I suspect that, since this was the cheapest decent MPPT for a long while, a lot of DIYers messed up the wiring enough to fry a lot of them, and so they developed a reputation.

They output close to the same voltage, but whichever one picks the lowest output voltage tends to get clipped first.

I have 4 MPPT #solar charge controllers now, and such interesting graphs.

These controllers don't share any communications, behavior is based only on observed voltage and there is some emergent behavior when there's not enough load for them all to run flat out. It's neat that this works.

good day to install an outlet for an EV charger

welp, my EV does not provide any way to set the clock or time zone, it's all full auto... So I can't do anything to make it display my personal time zone, which of course remains DST year round

Gonna fix this with electrician's tape on the screen I expect.

More annoying is this means that a configured charging time swings out of alignment with when the sunlight is actually available. I will eventually fix that by controlling time in the EVSE, rather than the car.