Projects

In my previous post about r1-eye, I described using a jailbroken Rabbit R1 to watch my coffee roasts and send images to Claude Vision for analysis. It worked but there are 2 issues I found when trying to place the camera for the best shot. The first is that there is nothing you can use to mount the r1. I used stacked cardboard boxes which I constantly bumped. The second is the bright orange frame of the r1. The reflection skewed the color of all the images and we had to resort to a cropping mechanism to remove it. ...

As I described in my previous post Automated Coffee Roasting Analysis, I roast coffee at home on a Hottop KN-8828b-2k+. The Hottop has a viewport on the left side facing away from the control panel. When roasting all my focus is on the laptop, which sits on the right side of the roaster. I can’t really see the beans during the roast and can’t visually assess the changes, which is a key criteria of the beans’ development. ...

I roast coffee at home on a Hottop KN-8828B-2K+. This roaster can connect to Artisan for logging and roaster control. When I first bought the roaster I tried using it with Artisan but I fundamentally didn’t understand the roasting process. It was too confusing to know what to change. The software felt very overwhelming. I like to learn on my own and I couldn’t find any source of information that really helped me understand both the process and the software. I wound up defaulting to the automatic program on the Hottop. ...

My family and I go fishing regularly at the White River below Bull Shoals Dam. One of the main topics of conversation is “how many generators are running”, as that impacts where you can go, what the fishing might be like, whether you can get out and wade. To get that information, you call the Army Corps of Engineers and listen to the recording. I thought that was so old-fashioned, why can’t we do that with a bot…just send a text and get the data back through an api. The thing was there was no simple generation count. The data was all in cubic feet per second (CFS)…and down the rabbit hole I went. ...

Like many people I was excited when the Rabbit R1 was announced and quickly bought one. Within minutes I could see it was a fairly useless device as shipped. I put it on the shelf with a vague notion that I would do something with it later. A year later, I tried jailbreaking it, only to brick it. Back on the shelf it would go. As Claude Code became more proficient, I decided to try again. Claude’s eagerness was just the quality I needed to keep at it. I could try anything at all without any complaints from my companion. ...