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Rustic Retreat

Live broadcasts and documentation from a remote tech outpost in rustic Portugal. Sharing off-grid life, the necessary research & development and the pursuit of life, without centralized infrastructure.

Rustic RetreatSubscribe to our new main project Rustic Retreat on the projects own website.

Hot Projects

SEEDStack

SEEDStack - Open 3D printable seed/sprouting systemDIY Food Hacking

UCSSPM

UCSSPM - Unified Clear-Sky Solar Prediction ModelOpen Solar Power

picoReflow

picoReflow - DIY PID Reflow Oven Controller based on RaspberryPiDIY Reflow Soldering

PiGI

PiGI - DIY Geiger Counter based on RaspberryPiRasPi Geiger Counter

DIY ARA-2000

Active Wideband Receiver Antenna for SDR - ARA-2000Wideband Antenna

DSpace

DSPace - Map everythingMap everything!

Mission-Tags

Apollo-NG Mobile Hackbase

Apollo-NG Hackerspacecraft

Apollo-NG is a mobile, self-sustainable, independent and highly-experimental Hackbase, focused on research, development and usage of next-generation open technology while visiting places without a resident, local Hackerspace and offering other Hackers the opportunity to work together on exciting projects and to share fun, food, tools & resources, knowledge, experience and inspiration.

Latest Mission-Log Entries

Flight-Control Log

The Apollo-NG website and its underlying/supporting infrastructure was beginning to show some severe issues caused by lacking upstream support for Linux VZ. Additionally, for other reasons, whole IP ranges had to be moved so each Box had an additional interface for the migration period which made HTTP or git communication with github.com impossible. That's why the automated deployment of DSpace failed.

However, http://www.netcup.de/ gratefully decided to stick to their decision to sponsor Apollo-NG's hosted network infrastructure needs and provided a new KVM box with more disk space and memory.

The migration to the new box is complete now, hopefully all name servers got the hint as well. The pads are also back online and should also receive a considerable speedup. In the progression of the update the SPDY (Speedy) protocol was added to collect some metrics about the performance gain and to see how it behaves in a smaller set of the real world.

Hopefully, that will conclude this maintenance/update cycle and free resources to find more sponsors and to continue with ongoing projects

2013-06-14 20:47 · chrono

Apollo-NG website relaunched

In case you have been here before you might want to hit Shift+F5 and clear your cache to avoid any local caching issues. It was a hard decision to take away available timeslots from other research projects but it was necessary to update the rather quaint and non-committing old design. This project is about the future, about modernization and leaving old, inherited, legacy ballast from many contexts of human activity behind. The UI should reflect that.

Luckily, just in the same timeslot the DokuWiki developer crowd has finished the new Weatherwax release, which fixed a lot of issues and drastically decreased the amount of necessary plugins to get all needed features for this site. So a big thanks to all the people who have participated in DokuWiki is in order.

DokuWiki has proved itself here as a totally versatile platform, mixing together features of content-management-systems, wikis, blogs and enough freedom to intertwine them with a hacked up UI and only very minor changes under the hood. And still, even after testing many other solutions, when weighing the amount of required server resources and easy maintainability vs. features, performance and stability there still wasn't any other system that could even come close to its efficiency and ease of integration.

2013-06-09 11:05 · chrono

Project Release: PiGI Module

Thanks to Maximilian Batz from http://www.pi3g.com/, who sponsored two Raspberry Pi B models for the cause of Apollo-NG, it was time to see what more could be done with them. This essentially forked two subprojects:

  • Raspberry Pi based autonomous Antenna Tracker (following a MAVLink enabled UAV/Drone)
  • Raspberry Pi based geiger-counter

The Tracker is working but still in alpha state (built as a mockup) and not released yet but after a combined amount of 10 days the pigi was finished, including the prototype boards. Some basic documentation is done, the github repo is online and basic prove-of-concept code is finished. It goes to show how amazingly fast we can dive into new technologies today and come up with a new thing without having any prior knowledge how to build a geiger counter. Sharing knowledge via Internet simply rules :)

→ Read more...

2013-06-09 09:49 · chrono