Hero camper recently announced their new Nested Drawer — it’s a small drawer that gets mounted above the cooler and holds the gas hob parts safely.

Which is pretty genius; the pan support is cast iron and quite heavy. Having all parts for the gas hob safely stored and easily available is a win 🎉

It was straightforward to install, but needed a little modification to improve the stability of the gas hob parts. Getting the cooler back in and connected afterwards was a bit of a challenge.

The kitchen space on our Hero Camper is limited — well, actually all space on the camper is limited, but this post is about the kitchen.

So we need to make the most of the three drawers in the kitchen — the top drawer is for cutlery and misc kitchen utilities. We looked at store-bought drawer dividers, but didn’t find anything that fit.

The dimensions of the drawer are probably somewhat unusual at 45.8 × 43.2 cm, meaning every divider we found left lots of unused space around it and just didn’t seem like a good solution. We didn’t want a plastic divider moving around as we were driving.

So we figured: we’ll make one — and so we did 😀

When we first got the camper I was confused by the low charge rate of the solar charger. In bulk it would charge just fine, but when in float — it would let the battery discharge to ~13V before re-entering bulk charging. That is far too low for a camper solar setup.

I found an online discussion regarding the EPEVER Tracer that explained the behavior. The settings are not well optimized for a solar system on a camper, where you want to utilize the sun as much as possible.

Keep it simple, stupid — less is more, or as Albert Einstein didn’t actually say:

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

What he actually said, according to Quote Investigator:

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

But I digress… It’s not lost on me that I sometimes end up making things more complex than they have to be. Often without it adding any value. Like entropy — slowly increasing the state of disorder.

For the past two years we, meaning all five of us, have taken a two-week road trip in the summer. Driving around our beautiful country that is Norway 🙂

First year we rented Airbnb’s — comfortable, but expensive and required a lot of planning. Then we tried tenting — cheaper, more flexible but took a lot of time to make camp.

So we bought a teardrop camper, or more precisely, a Hero Camper Ranger edition. We named it Rulle (Norwegian for Rolly) Ranger.

The keypad, or alarm panel, is an important part of a security alarm system. When I first got started building mine — I settled for a cheap and simple Zigbee keypad.

I’ve since replaced it with a better, and more advanced device. Let’s have a look…

Quick recap: I’m building a DIY security alarm using a Raspberry Pi, hardwired PIR sensors, and MQTT integration with Home Assistant.

Hello again — it seems to be close to a year since I last managed to get some words published on this blog. And almost three years since I last wrote about my Raspberry Pi security alarm project 😮

But the project is still alive and well. We use it every night and whenever we are away, and it just works 😃 Development usually happens in bulk, with very little happening in between.

In the fall of 2022 I turned off Zeta, my file server, due to the extreme price of electricity. I migrated all the data to a 3x18 TB raidz1 pool on Alpha instead.

But last year I brought it back — and used the opportunity to add some more memory, and rebuild the main storage pool 🤓

When I was trying out Netdata last year — I noticed I had lots of inbound_packets_dropped_ratio warnings, on multiple nodes.

Time to investigate 👇

I’ve looked into different video solution for this blog before — and, at the time, settled on using Coconut.co for encoding, AWS S3 for hosting, and Video.js for playing.

Bunny Stream was on the table back then, but I wanted a more hands on solution. Well — this time around I wanted a hands off solution, where the videos just work without me having to worry about it 🙂

And for that — Bunny Stream is pretty awesome, so that’s what I’m using now 👍