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Meet Bionode

A Mobile Lab on a Hand Truck by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Introducing a self-sufficient information toolkit on wheels… with 14TB of NAS, video and audio production, sensor suite, security, communications, embedded AI, on-board power with solar charging, PC/Mac/Linux development systems, and mesh networking. Background I seem to have made a career of…

If you look just below it, you can see the Bluetti AC70 power system in the cabinet… not exactly a UPS (no NUT or NAS support and no Home Assistant integration since they added encryption to their BLE connection) but still a sweet and well-scaled (768 watt-hour) rig for my anticipated loads, including solar charge capability. This machine was taking over a corner of my lab and spawning a shelf full of gizmos, some of which are mounted on the hinged HDPE roof… router with antennas, a Shure studio mic on its arm, camera with prompter, keylight, PTZ security cam, soundbar, exit fans for the compute stack, and sensor module. Meshtastic is essential these days if you want a secure pipe between people without having to involve the Internet; it self-organizes into a mesh if the density of stations is sufficient, and is also a great way to pass notifications and low-bandwidth sensor data (using MQTT) as long as you keep it from spilling onto public channels.

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