Day 25, 26, 27 - Tucson, AZ

Thursday (25) - For the next week, we are at a KOA park in Tucson, AZ. It is a family-oriented park with a couple of pools. Kind of on the expensive side and definitely one of the most resort-y parks we've been in. There are even covered sites. The overhead roof is covered with solar panels which, supposedly, provide most of the power used in the park.

Right now, I'm sitting outside waiting for a morning test session to begin. It a very pleasant 72°F. Not a bad way to spend the morning. By mid-afternoon, it was 88°F so too hot to sit outside for the afternoon test session.

Friday (26) - It was a very warm 88°F this afternoon. This weekend is forecast to be even warmer. We did get some errands run but have a few more things to do. 

A new project showed up on my radar. Victron supports an open-source project for their Venus operating system, You can purchase their color controller to manage and monitor their products or you can run it on a Raspberry Pi. The Pi 3 B+ is recommended as it has built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. If the Victron products have Bluetooth, you can connect right in. If not, you can use their VE.Direct USB cable. Both the charge controller and the battery monitor support Bluetooth so this may be a great way to monitor the solar output. Since the "spare" Raspberry Pi I have with me is a Pi 2, I went ahead and ordered another Pi 3 B+ and the 7" touch screen display from Amazon. It should arrive at the RV park sometime next week. For comparison, the Victron color controller is over $1000 while the Raspberry Pi with the display is a bit over $100. If it works, it’s a bargain. Plus there are commands to display data without using the GUI. 

Saturday (27) -  It's a very pleasant 79°F this morning while I'm waiting for the morning test session to begin. I am planning to try using the campground WiFi as it seemed to be working pretty well. I've been watching YouTube this morning and some Amazon Prime last night. All in HD.

I went ahead and started the A/C in the RV since I am baking pie crust. There are tons of citrus fruit trees around the RV park and on Wednesday, some of the kids visiting our friends picked a lot of grapefruit. I found a recipe for a grapefruit curd pie. It sounds like it may be worth trying out.

Later -  The WiFi seemed to work okay. Some audio artifacts but overall, it worked. That's good as I had run out of Verizon hot spot data last week and it won't renew for 5 more days.

This is one of two pools here at the park. I figured that it may be crowded as it’s already 86°F. No humidity to speak of.