Introducing HiTechHomestead
Follow along as I share how I built my own off-grid homestead automation system that runs completely within my own network with zero subscriptions, no proprietary apps, and no downtime when the internet goes out. This is a system that keeps your data on your farm, so you get the insights, not some giant corporation or Silicon Valley startup run by tech bros and venture capital. I’m just a guy who loves to tinker with electronics and is always looking for new ways to solve problems around our little farm.
My lifelong passion for home automation started the way a lot of side projects do: a group of college roommates, no money, a pile of parts from an old assignment, and some time to kill. The very first project started with a simple homemade wireless light switch and a retractable projector screen made from a bed sheet, a curtain rod, and some salvaged RC-car motors. The “killer feature” of the whole system was a “tune detector” that would kill the lights and drop the movie screen when you whistled just the right sequence of notes - our attempt at a primitive smart speaker before Amazon and Google. Back in those days, we didn't really know what we were doing when it came to computers, but we had learned enough in our first year of engineering school that we had a place to start. My roommates and I all shared a passion for learning, experimenting, and trying to make something useful out of what we had on hand. The whole solution was crude and held together with duct tape and twine. But it worked, and that initial success set me on a path that would define the next decade of my career designing and building embedded computer systems professionally.
For me, the exciting part about that first project wasn’t that it made watching movies easier (although that was a nice side effect). The part I loved was the magic of walking into the room, whistling the “secret tune”, and watching as the automation kicked in, transforming the space from a regular living room to a makeshift cinema. We had built an experience that was (at the time) exclusive to big theaters and folks with deep pockets. That early success lit a fire in me that’s been burning ever since.
It has been over a decade since that first college project, and I’ve spent the bulk of that time learning, building, and tinkering on my own projects at home. The habit of looking for new and creative solutions to problems around the house has never really stopped over all these years. My poor wife has been an absolute trooper, putting up with wires hanging out of wall plates, circuit boards tucked behind flower pots, and random components zip-tied to just about every electronic device imaginable. Over the years, I’ve experimented with different radio modules, sensors, batteries, and solar chargers. I’ve built and tested irrigation valve controllers, soil moisture sensors, humidity sensors, light switches, thermostats, garage door openers, door and window security sensors, motion-detecting lights, smart door locks—the list goes on. I enjoy the challenge of piecing things together and have never grown tired of the endorphin rush when it all works for the first time.
Not every one of these mini-projects has been successful, but most worked well enough to keep my curiosity alive and my wife only mildly annoyed. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Just about every solution has been a scrappy, cost-sensitive build, always looking for a way to match the functionality of the big guys while spending less.
As commercial “smart home" offerings got better and more affordable and my free time gradually reallocated to family time, I tried moving my home automation solutions toward off-the-shelf components when possible. This worked alright, but I never really felt satisfied with the disjointedness of vendor-locked apps, cloud dependencies, and the constant push for monthly subscription fees to keep the lights on.
In 2023, we left our home in suburbia and moved to a five-acre plot in the country, resetting to zero on the automation and control front. The new house wasn’t at all “smart,” and making it so would require a whole new approach compared to the mostly Wi-Fi-based system I’d built previously. The property isn’t huge, but I’ve only been able to cover about one-third of it with reliable Wi-Fi coverage, and Bluetooth is even worse. It quickly became apparent that doing anything with real utility would need a different approach.
Enter LoRa - a low-power, long-range radio technology that’s been shown to send data over 100km under ideal conditions. I stumbled across LoRa radios while we still lived in town and had always been intrigued by the promised potential. But living on a 6,000 sqft lot, I had very little practical use for such devices. I’d always felt like I had found a solution without a real problem.
After just a few months on the homestead, I started seeing real opportunities where Wi-Fi and Bluetooth fell short, and thought these LoRa radios could really shine. I finally had a problem for my solution! So I dug out my old LoRa development boards and started tinkering again (my wife was less than thrilled). My first tests showed promising results: I could reliably send sensor data from the furthest corners of my property to a tiny base station in the laundry room with no optimization effort and minimal power consumption.
Encouraged by these initial results, I kept pushing forward and got more ambitious with my experiments. I started building devices that met real needs around the farm.
Over the past two years, I’ve built and tested irrigation valve controllers, pond-level sensors, and various environmental monitors; all using LoRa as the backbone. Some designs have been rock-solid; others failed spectacularly. Each brought some new lesson about battery management, waterproofing, or firmware design.
For a while, I thought I might bring some of my custom designs to market as physical products. While I’m not ruling that out for the future, I’m not currently in a good life stage to handle the logistical overhead of custom hardware design, development, and fulfillment. But I still think my designs could help other homesteaders and farmers out there, so I’ve been working hard these last several months on a slightly different approach.
With this post, I’m excited to introduce my next project: HiTechHomestead, a place to document what I’m building and share what has actually worked on my small farm. I’m not trying to sell gadgets (yet), and I’m not promoting hyped-up “smart” solutions you can buy and deploy in a day. My goal is to provide education and share my lessons learned in the hopes that some folks out there find it valuable, and could follow in my footsteps to build a similar system of their own.
If you’ve ever looked at a commercial “smart” farm system and thought, “There has to be a cheaper way to do this yourself,” you’re in the right place.
I’ve been pulling countless late nights and early mornings compiling all my notes and random projects into something that I hope can bring you value. I'm adapting my previous builds to use commonly available hardware, and building out a software toolkit that aims to remove as much of the friction from the DIY process as I can.
As I pull all of this together, I'll be periodically providing updates here in this thread, so if this project sounds like something you want to follow, I’d love to have you along for the ride!
All subscribers get free access to the desktop toolkit demo, demo node firmware, and a detailed guide for putting it all together to build your own DIY, off-grid, temperature and humidity tracking system. The demo bundle isn’t quite ready, but I’ll announce it here as soon as it’s ready to go live.