Lurker saying hello

[craigify]

I thought I might actually say hello. We are Craig and Laura.


We live in New Orleans most of the time, but head up to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area at least once a year during the summer. We converted a 1993 Bluebird Minibird and use it as our adventure bus. We're both engineers and so we decided to pool our skillset together and build this thing. We hired the help of an interior designer, and a master carpenter, as well as our own work.



It's capable of 100% remote work with triple homed LTE dedicated internet connection, a large battery bank, generator and a giant 80 gallon gas tank original was 30 gallon...WTF.


Inside are two dedicated workspaces for computers.


It's all built out, but it will never actually be finished.

Not sure what else to say. Either people like all the details or their eyes glaze over

https://www.skoolie.net/forums/f47/el-autobus-1993-bluebird-mini-bird-37427.html#post453290



Here is the the registry for it.

[Rwnielsen]

Welcome to the asylum. Lots of of friendly people here and, most times, good information and ideas

[rossvtaylor]

And a welcome from me, too. That's a nice looking rig and you did a commendable job populating the registry with pics and info. Kudos!

[craigify]

Thanks, everyone. I've taken lots of pictures of everything we've done to it. We are up in Minnesota right now and we'll probably stay for a while longer. I want to see the big tree color changes.

I have this problem where I just have to take things apart and build things. I think I invent projects for myself.

I never thought I'd learn so much about 1900s era GM fuel injection, for example! I'm also lucky my wife is really good with woodworking. She takes after her mother and her grandfather.

Some plans I have coming up:

I built my own mountain bike from an older Trek aluminum frame. Got a nice wheelset, groupset, new handlebars and new front suspension fork. I hope to make use of that on some singletrack and gravel trails during the winter time. Remember, winter in the US south is pretty good outdoors weather. Well, when compared to Minnesota at least.

Next are my nerd hobbies. I discovered software defined radio a few years ago, and I attempted, with moderate success, to use some tools to build a P25 trunked radio scanner. It seems there has since been a bit of a cottage industry build up around this hobby and there are numerous affordable radios that you can buy to plug in to the software frameworks. I thought it might be neat to see what kind of weird stuff may exist out in rural places with some equipment inside and some antennas. I need to figure out how to build a telescoping antenna mast that I can store somewhere and then extend up a number of feet above the bus.

Next on the list is buying a serious telescope. I want to hook it into a computer inside and point it at celestial objects using planetarium software. Next I want to hook up a camera instead of an eyepiece and create an astrophotography set up.

Any others with some nerdy hobbies here?