Yup.

Not having money for food or a place to live prevents a whole lot of actions being taken that are appropriate and necessary.

If it works for you, great. To me that’s a risk of more stuff that could break and cause problems when you could just have a DC barrel and move on.

I can definitely think of some edge cases where it would be handy though.

Considering these are to be used as a router, what are you planning on powering it off of? I can’t see much use where you’d put this unit behind a poe switch aside from maybe blocking a problematic device (in a corporate setting to meet security requirements). If it’s for a small switch scenario, you’d get the performance out of a (slightly) cheaper dedicated switch.

Solar powered battery banks which keep a few things up and running in my office (glass sliding doors, so I get plenty of light. Also use them to charge my phone and such.

My bike, which I used to ride to the bus to get into work until I went full remote. Has a small solar kit for my lights to stay charged on long rides. It’s been a bit due to some joint issues, getting back into it now, but used to do centuries every weekend. Didn’t need to it charge to full, whatever trickle worked just to extend it past the 4 or so hours it would do from full, then charge on the battery banks.

Gardening and associated sensors. Working on moving those over to lorawan, right now the updates are a bit spotty even at once every 4 hours updating due to distance.

I’ve got a bunch of stuff that’s running on lightweight chips, like esp8266’s and ESP32s, to do things like Bluetooth beaconing, lights (wled), etc.

It’ll be a bit, but we are going to need to move to something with a bit more space, so other plans (solar + battery for the whole home, indirect solar water heating, etc) will be on hold for a bit.

Ground up, sure, wired becomes an easy solution. Ad-hoc growth though (which is what I would expect to be more likely) wireless becomes advantageous. Running new lines is going to be way more than the couples hundred for an antenna stand and couple hundred to low thousands for gear (distance dependant) if there isn’t a pathway already there and usable.

And yeah, the pipe out is the kicker always. That would either need to be a bunch of locations with a solid, but lower speed connection, or a high speed line (with fail over ideally). Which mostly means a shared cost and management.

I’d love to see something like this for a community, though you’d have to have enough folks to get it started.

I remember years ago there was a town/small city, I think in NZ, that started doing fiber distribution to everyone in town. It was optional to light it up, but with distribution like that it was real easy for them to have a singular community wifi solution as folks went around town, and they used (again, iirc) copper on utility poles for distribution to homes where they could, antennas on poles for those further out. That was super exciting to me, especially as a locally run initiative.

I’m hoping to find a community when we next move that has that sort of local drive to get projects done (and also has decent schools for my kids), though still searching on that.

First off - loved hunt the wumpus when I was little.

Second, I’d consider what’s possible as well - as in mesh network solutions that would apply to a community.

You can get over a gig with a 24ghz point to point for around 50W max draw. For point to multi, you can do something like the prism station for only 10W or a simple AP for less noisy environments. You can then extend with mesh for another 10W max or so.

Its perfectly viable imo to get 100mbit or more on pretty low power. You could get more than 24hrs of backup off a wheelchair battery for even the point to point stuff which will require more power for the long distance transmission.

With a bit more money into equipment, speeds can go even higher, but even at the lower price point you can get quite a bit more than 10mbit with large scale mesh. More than enough for most use cases!

Yeah, if you had the storage I’d say use an Ethernet dongle on the phone, wire up Ethernet on the laptop (as long as it’s not a USB 2 dongle that you’d need :) ), transfer over network that way and give yourself some easier transport than wifi…

But in your case, yeah wifi is the right call.

My workflow for reference, I’ve got a dock that supports 3.2gen2, so I connect my phone up there. I’ve got 1 gig on the dock, and I copy over to my NAS (4x1gbit in LAG), and with the dock having USB for mice/keyboard use it’s easy peasy. Once backed up, new phone to the dock, and go the other way.

Most files are already backed up though, with the NAS and my self hosted services, so it’s mostly a single instances backup and not much to copy back.

Got it - yeah the big hit is USB functionality for the external definitely.

Do you have sufficient laptop storage to make it temporary? Maybe even in batches?

I’ve got a polar h10 myself, I know their app still connects to Fit not health connect, but I’m sure they will update.

I actually made an app to make use of health connect with my polar h10 for entirely different purposes, it’s really a pretty minor backend change for them to make, so I’m sure Beat will get an update.

What are you transferring to/from?

USB Ethernet dongles

That’s how I do it, though I put it on my NAS first for safe keeping.

Not really the question I was answering, but that’s not actually a health connect problem.

Withings had an issue, and the way they were connecting to it, which caused a battery drain. To be specific, withings health mate was constantly reading health connect data, which caused a massive power drain.

I’m not aware of any other battery issues with health connect other than Withings and their Health Mate app (specifically reading, not writing).

(Edit: why, why would autocorrect change writing to riding? For shame. To me, for not noticing sooner.)

Just to be clear - it’s the API that’s shutting down, not the app. Not that Google has put in effort for the app either, it hasn’t updated since health connect afaik, but health connect is the health and fitness tooling going forward.

Fitbit has health connect support now, so even if they shift and drop Fit (I hope not, though I also hoped they wouldn’t kill the web interface), and make Fitbit the main Google fitness app, it will still work with Fitbit as the app.

If it uses health connect to send the data it’s still all good. And if you bought something recently made, it should.

ResourceSpace maybe?

https://www.resourcespace.com/