In the coming months, we are moving from the RV and into an apartment. Its been a long few years with a lot of stress and no space, so we’ve made the decision to go back to standard housing and get rid of the RV. Whether we sell it, junk it, or what, we don’t know yet. But it will eventually be gone.
Where does that leave Bubba on the Road?
We are rebranding to Bubba So Smart, a blog of smart home technology reviews and news, walkthroughs and tutorials. I tried to make our RV a Smart Home on Wheels, and while we added a lot of technology, we never made it truly smart. With a change to a new home, we do plan to do that since an apartment is a little more able to be modified and built more in line with most smart home technology.
The problem with building a Smart Home on Wheels is that so much of the smart home technology is designed for an always-on system. In an RV, the easiest way to do that is to use DC power off the batteries, and most smart home tech is based on AC power demands. To build similar devices or convert them to use, we’d either have to build our own from scratch or add an inverter to have always present AC power. To have an inverter that worked fully, we’d have to have more batteries, and thus charge them with solar panels.
And, well, that never worked out. With so many issues with the RV, we were focused on making things more comfortable and keeping things running and not making them more convenient and smart. Its hard to deal with camera systems and automatic lights when you are stuck dealing with broken transmissions and leaks in the roof.
Bubba on the Road is not going anywhere though. The site will remain largely the same, the old reviews will still be there, and if I have the opportunity, we will build a Smart Home on Wheels, but it will more likely be a CamperVan. Smaller, more efficient, more compact, and more reliable. That is likely years down the line though, so to keep the blog going and making some (small) amount of gains, we’ll be focusing on Smart Home technology in apartments.
It is my opinion (obviously, its my blog), that there is a gap between smart home technology that can be installed in a house owned an apartment that is rented and can’t be fully remodeled to make smart. To that end, we’ll be focusing on technology that doesn’t require rewiring or taking out drywall. Things that can be done temporarily and then taken out when we move out. We do plan to buy a house eventually, so the technology we have should be useful in the future in the event that it is still modern enough to be of use.
In the coming days, I’ll be discussing different technologies we can use as we decide on what protocol to use for our system. I’ll be discussing things like media servers as well and reviews of individual devices and technologies we’ll be using as well as ones we test out and may not fit our needs or uses.
Thanks for reading, come back for more!
