Welcome!
Hi There! I’m Kyson. I’ve spent the last decade of my life tinkering with DIY home automation in my spare time between raising a small family and working job as an embedded computer engineer. About two years ago, I moved my family from our home in suburbia to a five-acre plot outside of town where we started building out a very small farming operation. Even though we’re crazy busy these days, I can’t help but continue pursue my long-time passion for slapping electronic gizmos into anything I can think of.
I’m starting HiTechHomestead because as I’ve spent time working on the farm, I’ve been less than impressed with commercial offerings available in the farm/homestead automation space. Solutions are very proprietary, high-cost, generally seem targeted at large operations and growers and almost always come with recurring subscription fees. Consumer-grade products are way more affordable but often don’t meet the needs on a small farm or homestead when we are trying to cover gardens, outbuildings, and pastures spread out over multiple acres. Over the last couple years I’ve been able to leverage my experience tinkering and computer engineering background to assemble a system that I think anyone can build for themselves using off-the-shelf hobby-grade sensors. I’ve built some cool stuff over the years and I want to help you do the same!
What to Expect
This blog is where I’ll be documenting my progress and will be sharing updates about what I’m working on. Follow along as I share more about building my own custom homestead-automation system that runs completely within my own network with zero subscriptions, and no downtime when the internet goes out. This is a system that keeps my data on my farm so I get to keep the insights instead of shipping it off to some giant corporation or Silicon Valley startup run by tech bros and venture capital for data mining. The goal of HiTechHomestead is to compile all the info you need to assemble a system just like mine; a farm-automation system that puts you in control of your farm and your data. No monthly subscription fees, no dependence on cloud service providers. You own the sensors, the data, and everything in between.
Right now, everything on the blog is free while I get the various foundation pieces in place. If you subscribe, you’ll get new posts as they come out - including the upcoming build guide showing how to build a simple temperature & humidity sensor using off-the-shelf Meshtastic hardware. I’ll show you how to assemble a matching gateway device and connect the real-time data to your own custom data dashboard via the HiTechHomestead Toolkit.
In the future, I’ll be adding a paid tier that offers behind-the-scenes look at the system and share my thought process of how and why. Check out the what you get page for more details on how I plan to break things up between the free offerings and the paid subscribers.
You can learn even more about my background story and how I ended up here by checking out the intro post.
P.S. In case you missed it - all subscribers get a free copy of HTH Toolkit demo and a detailed build guide (with firmware included!) for a DIY temperature+humidity sensor and matching gateway. There are a few finishing touches in the works before I can send it out, so please subscribe and I'll let you know as soon as it is ready!
