So I am in the designing of the circuit and PCB stage right now.

The usecase is for Meshtastic/Meshcore nodes because those sit outside in a tree or in a high place outside year-round and are solar charged. I am designing it as a RAKwireless Wisblock power module that will be charged by 2, 5V, 200mA small solar panels in series. The whole project will be released on Codeberg like all of my home projects.

Later I can copy the circuit over to other PCBs for more general formats. One of my future projects is going to be an 8S pack BMS for driving a 12V water pump for off-grid rainwater collection barrels.

I am targeting 2S systems now because then the entire sodium cell can discharge if the system voltage is set to 3V and I don’t need any buck/boost, just a buck which is significantly cheaper and easier on the batteries.

I am using an STM32C011 as a custom BMS + buck charger because my original idea of using a very cheap, small mixed signal FPGA (greenpak SLG47105) wouldn’t work well for sodium because it didn’t have enough comparators to have a soft constant voltage region (gradually increasing CV voltage from 3.8V per cell to 4V along with the natural current decrease to prolong charge cycle life), it will have overvoltage/over current protections, 1A or 2A max current, resistive battery balancing, and some safety features and an I2C readout.

(Sorry, wall of text)

I agree.

Also, Health Connect now is integrated as of 2026 which is absolutely huge for actually allowing app interoperability.

We have heat pumps at my job for our factory.

They are literally useless around of below freezing in the experience here.

They exchange heat so they blow out air colder than outside air, then their entire radiator gets completely covered in ice, then it has to switch off and then the entire factory cools off while they have to turn on the resistive heaters to defrost themselves, then they turn themselves back on and because they are covered in water from defrosting, very quickly freeze again and the whole cycle repeats while the factory is very marginally warmed up during the cycle.

Alright I can answer this because with all the shit there have also been a ton of cool tech that isn’t fascist, and ton of instances of the community building something awesome:

**Commercial things: **

• Sodium Batteries (I have a 18650 shipment on the way for my custom charger)

• Solar panels have dropped in price so dramatically that they are viable for hundreds of millions of people

• Prusa and Bambu have made 3d printing not just a hobby, but very functional and practical. Now people themselves can replace broken parts, create new functional parts and tools without having to make their entire hobby and personality trying to fix and optimize their 3D printer

• MCUs have blasted off the past 10 years. nRF has revolutionized the Bluetooth space with nRF52 and newer. ESP has brought WiFi to literally everyone in any device they want with whatever processor strength with no antenna design. STM is very friendly to hobbyists and has everything for motors, and NXP makes performance beasts (and all non-US companies doing the great things of course) and they have all become so much more dramatically efficient.

• Multiple MCU companies have switched to open source toolchains that are inter-compatible, more portable, and transparent, making embedded development much less relying on shitty half-baked manufacturer libraries that are incomplete for different offerings.

• FOC motor control and bringing it to the masses have created a huge step in motors and have made implementing efficient servos actually viable for open source projects

• RLCD is an up and comer that gives epaper-like reduced eye strain and outdoor visibility while having an update rate of an LCD.

Maybe older, but still great:

• open source hardware companies like adafruit, sparkfun, olimex, etc… Have made electronics so much more accessible to actually do useful things with.

• epaper displays being widely available for power savings in small devices

**Community Projects: **

• HomeAssistant has gone from an enthusiast system 10 years ago, to literally the best, and easily customizable automation system that supports every

• Meshtastic and Meshcore bringing community location services and communication to everyone for a very cheap price

• Docker and Podman. They have revolutionized the server space.

• The leaps and bounds made in self hosting software in general is incredible and taken self hosting from a quite risky and very very complicated technical endeavor to do safely to a medium difficulty hobby project that is 100x less of a time sink. Not only that, but commercial software has genuinely good replacements Traefik/caddt, crowdsec, docker, immich, paperless-ngx, jellyfin, mealie, syncthing, nextcloud/opencloud, *arr suite, etc…

• The fediverse, still in early stages, but I don’t need to explain the impact

• Gadgetbridge, turning smart wearables spying on you and selling your biometric data to insurance companies to just plain useful local devices for looking after yourself

There is more, but this is already long

Sodium companies closing is incredibly painful because also if you look at the reasons, outside of Northvolt, it is literally all startups where their investors pulled out and screwed them because lithium prices dropped and they wanted to recoup their costs with 30% market share on week 1 of launch (exaggeration of course)

Proving yet again that rich fucks are complete and total idiots who can’t look any further at all than 4-8 quarters.

China sodium is luckily going strong, so we have a fallback when lithium prices inevitably spike yet again.

I don’t know, that is about all Mistral can do too.

That and python scipy is like a 50/50 for relevant code snippits.

It had never once output compilable embedded code, even when I have tried to directly lead it there.

Also, THC drinks are all over the US now and very popular. Most of my (young millennial) friends there barely drink alcohol and have swapped them with gummies and seltzers.

No because she evidence is stille their, they just don’t have access to it (legally if they use certain tools, apparently all phones outsider of the newest pixel and most grapheneOS are exploitable and unlockable).

So that is the reason, that they would kever have access tot it when erased, as opposed to possibly getting a court order for the data in the future or nowadays just paying for an unlock tool illegally (depending on location)

It’s technically possible by water fasting for 2 months, but that is pretty dangerous for so long and you would need a strict vitamin and salt intake to even have a chance of doing it safely.

Definitely not a good idea, certainly not without doctor supervision.

They can prosecute you for that in many places as destruction of evidence.

(Which is weird because if they fail to convict you for whatever BS they are going for then it is the Goose meme of “evidence for what???”)

correct, the real mesh internet replacement is HaLow, that can get a whopping 4Mbps or something.

And this is why I try to recommend to every single person starting their smart home to plan it so that if everything dies, their internet, their router, power gets restarted, and their HomeAssistant gets corrupted, and you die, at the same time, that everything will work exactly as expected, because with MANY smart home systems they will just stop functioning or be stuck in a bad mode until your family hires someone to fix it.

That’s why I lean hard towards KNX

I might catch flak for this, but I understand Fahrenheit made a ton of sense of an illiterate bygone era (well, I guess coming back maybe)

The vast majority of people were uneducated. Decimals were a non-starter, maybe negatives were also difficult?

0-100 was very easy. Under 0? Don’t go outside if possible. Over 100? Don’t go outside if possible. >50/halfway? Time for a coat. Having the same scale from -15 to 40 might have been confusing and not centered for them?

And Bing, and searches that use google and Bing results (DDG, ecosia)

Well CAD software has made leaps and bounds since then. Anyone who used CAD back in the day would know what an unstable clusterfuck it was and how much longer it took than now.

A lot of software has gotten much better, including “core” Foss like Linux and FFMPEG. There is just 10x as much software that is horrible, and windows has gotten so much worse to the point that it feels like computers have made no progress when you use it.

Also, CPUs nowadays use about the same power as they did 20 years ago but with an order of magnitude more processing power, and the idle power consumption is much much much lower. The first Core 2 Duo had a 65W TDP, the same as modern Ryzen 5. GPUs are just out of hand with power consumption because of profit-driven game companies and AI.

… Pretty much every CPU contains backdoors, not just american ones. The Chinese government does the exact same thing as the American government. They are two sides of the same coin but the Chinese government seems more competent and efficient unlike the US government.

Even if the hardware doesn’t have backdoors, the firmware often will, which you also can’t get around with software.

The tier after that is software which also has a lot of back doors, luckily, you can run Linux and open source software. That is the best you can do. Really the only thing you can “trust” not to have backdoors is MCUs because those backdoors are much more likely to need physical access.

Sadly, our entire tech world is built on backdoors and intentional security flaws to enable easier debugging, recovery, and compliance with government law enforcement after the sale.

Now you can see 30 of the same reposted tiktok spam blasting low quality live music instead of 10!

Oh well I guess it doesn’t matter anyway because if you try to update the app anyway it just downloads an invalid APK lol

Deep sea diving repairs.

You have to go into a pressure chamber as soon as humanly possible when you arrive from the deep void of nothingness or else you rupture and die. If anyone needs a union it is those guys. They should be paid 3x the ceo’s salary.

Also, sketch YouTube comedians like Smosh, Dropout, etc… I couldn’t be “on” doing comedy for 6-8 hours a day recording constantly.

Minnesota is one of the only states with large social protections, and is one of the most progressive States in terms of actual impactful policies. The MN Dem party also isn’t the US Dems. They are a seperate Democratic-Farmer-Labor which is significantly farther left than the center-right-wing dems.

Walz even tried to ban corporations from owning single family homes outright a few years ago (republicans blocked it then wonder why home prices soar)

That is why trump hates MN, and the fact that Walz ran against him.

Star Tribune has been covering these protests more than national news.

But yeah, early reports say 50,000 people, but the videos look much more like 100,000, and just in the main area.

Plus Minnesotans are actually organizing and they have rapid response teams to pick people up in the woods as ice beats them, tortures them, and then leaves them to die in -30C, often naked in the woods. Media doesn’t cover that either.

Plus, there are aid teams organizing food, diaper, and supply runs and distribution to at-risk population. A lot of people are working hard to keep people fed and alive while it is -30C outside

Plus they have ICE locating teams that follow ice as pass news on to different neighborhood when ICE is going there and pass out instructions.

Plus, smaller scale, but Minnesotans are starting to come out and have armed guards for neighborhoods against fascist occupation.

This is compared to in Texas and a lot of the South (famously “you can’t push us around, we all are armed”) where there was the most ICE activity for all of 2025, and they just bent over and took it while licking the boot on the other end.