Day 61, 62 - Wauchula, FL - TT

Saturday (61) - The AT&T Internet was good enough for a test session this morning. This was sort of the test as it’s the first one attempted from this RV park. There is fast WiFi at the clubhouse and pool but I haven’t made it there yet. 

When I was working on the refrigerator earlier this month, I noticed that the tech at the shop where we purchased the rig had simply jammed the 12VDC wire for the coil cooling fan into the terminal block. Sloppy incompetence. I had ordered these nice Wago terminals and this is the first time I’m trying them out. You just open the levers and insert the stripped wires. The spring-loaded levers snap closed and you have a solid connection that is reusable. Pretty cool! I have several more places I can use them. 

I finally got around to cleaning up the wiring and power in the cabinet next to the TV. The new item is the Anderson Powerpole connecting block near the top and the buck converter with a nice backlit display. I picked up the Powerpole connecting block at the Orlando Ham Radio Outlet and the buck convertor in kit form from Amazon. It takes anything from 5v to 30v as input and you can adjust the output voltage to whatever you want and, if you so choose, limit the output current. The older buck convertor (just to the left) is powering the Pi-Hole DNS blackhole server. It has over 96,000 domains on its blacklist and has blocked roughly 5% of dns requests. Probably all ads. I'll think I'll keep it running.

BTW, today was the first sunrise and sunset in Utqiaġvik since November. Sunrise at 1:25pm sunset at 1:52pm.

Sunday (62) - What is this all about? 33°F is the low for tonight! Not what I expected in Florida. I guess my expectations were wrong. We'll actually need to run the furnace instead of the heat pump tonight. I may as well dig out the electric space heater...

The new buck converter is working great. I'm using it to power the Raspberry Pi3 with a dual-band full-duplex UHF/VHF board as a hotspot. When I used a standard Pi 2.5-watt wall wart, the Pi would reboot whenever it transmitted. When the hotspot is just listening, it draws 2.4-watts. When transmitting, it goes up to about 2.54-watts. The old buck converter and most of my wall warts couldn't supply that and I ended up picking up a 3-watt wall wart on Amazon last summer. Now, it's powered off of 12VDC and not the inverter. I have one more buck converter to set up for the Pi running Venus OS, the Victron open-source software.