It's that time of year where all I want to do is hang around outside in the evenings. Light a fire, a cigar, and grab my beverage of choice and just listen to the sounds of nature. If I'm lucky maybe I'll get to check out the stars on a clear night. If I can convince some friends to join me, even better!
It's this last part that's been bugging me over the last month. I've got a fairly rustic property and while I can navigate it fairly easily (probably with my eyes closed), it's not the easiest for even my best friends... especially at night. To assist, I've installed solar powered, motion detector lights in some of the gnarliest to navigate spots. Unfortunately, I've
recently had some failures in these devices.
Initially, I was pretty much convinced that this had to be a battery problem. Either they were old and completely shot, or the solar panel was no longer properly charging them. I was shocked to discover that these fairly cheap devices were actually easy to disassemble without destroying them.
Bypassing the motion sensor was easy and I discovered that the batteries and solar panels were working just fine. The lights shone as bright as they ever had, so the issue was really with the motion sensor. This led to me diving down the rabbit hole of understanding how this particular model worked and I quickly discovered that I was out of my league with understanding exactly what could be wrong with
the integrated board that was being used to accomplish this.
Now, I'm pretty much back in the research stages for finding the perfect devices to replace the ones that have stopped working. Anyone have recommendations? Ideally they would not need to be hardwired, but I'm willing to go that route if the devices add additional capabilities that I didn't have before.
Software-wise, I've spent much of the last few months building all sorts of things with Shopify Flow. We're still in the testing phase with many of these items, but
ultimately this is going to save a ton of time with day to day operations (and hopefully reduce the error rate in things that we are currently doing manually). I feel like we'll ultimately be able to replace our Zapier infrastructure with this as well. This could be huge for many small ecommerce shops, as Zapier is an additional cost and Flow is now included in most Shopify plans. I just need to figure out how to best integrate AWeber with Flow as that seems like the one piece
that still will require Zapier at this point.
Obviously, I HAD to take advantage of all of my mycology lab upgrades from last month. I started a grow of some local PA white oyster mushrooms. This was the first time that I've ever used hardwood fuel pellets as a substrate and I've started experimenting with adding coffee grounds for added nitrogen. I've already harvested a few flushes. We made a great white oyster mushroom cream sauce to serve with meatballs.
