Tag: DIY Projects

"Home Automation" sounds like something that belongs, well... in the home. But since we sometimes live in a van, I could not help but wonder: is there anything the Internet of Things could make...

For those who want to dive deep into the Internet of Things, home-assistant.io provides an incredibly powerful platform for monitoring and automation. After years of using it, this article focuses on...

Anybody who's set up more than a single Raspberry Pi knows how frustrating it can be to keep them all up-to-date and working correctly. The slightest configuration change can require copying files...

To work from the road, we needed the van to also serve as a mobile office. It's hard enough to have an ergonomic work space at home or at an office. It was an even bigger challenge to make the...

Driving down dirt roads to dispersed campsites, things are always bouncing around in the van. We learned when building the sofa bed just how easily side-facing drawers can slide open. We thought it...

Building a kitchen in a van means making trade-offs. Do you really need hot water, or can you just boil some when you need it? Does the faucet need to have an electric pump, or can it just be done by...

Most vans I see have a similar layout: the bed at the back, and the kitchen near the sliding door on the side. I don't like this layout because, even though the area beneath the bed is used for...

I needed a way to for guests to control my home automation. There are many easy remote control products out there, like Harmony by Logitech. But home-assistant.io is so much more powerful than these...

In my quixotic quest for an entirely solar-powered van build, I also created a home automation server like that at my house. I ended up with an energy efficient steampunk computer with the same core...

For my camper van electric conversion, I wanted to have an entirely solar off-grid solution. To live for days or weeks in the woods, I could not rely upon shore power. But I'd never wired anything...