Off the clock
I live the tech I build.
Travel, electric vehicles, and a workbench that is never quite tidy. The same curiosity that builds the software, pointed at everything else.
Two EVs and a charger I actually understand.
I daily-drive a Mahindra XEV 9e and an Ather, and I went electric the way an engineer would: tracking the numbers, owning the charging setup at home, and learning where the range claims meet reality on an Indian road.
The switch started as arithmetic: a month of fuel bills against a home charger, and the charger won. The XEV 9e does the highway and family duty, the Ather does everything inside the city, and the petrol pump has become a place I stop for tyre pressure. The wallbox sits on its own circuit with energy monitoring, because of course it reports to my dashboard. Range anxiety lasted about two weeks; the plugging-in-at-night habit took one.
Places, and the gear to get there.
I travel light and a little over-prepared. Half the fun is the planning and the kit that comes with it.
The pattern is always the same: a long weekend, a route sketched in a spreadsheet, and a duffel that is half clothes, half chargers. Coorg and Chikmagalur are the regulars; the rest of the Western Ghats is the long-term project. The kit list has stabilised: one good power bank, offline maps, a tyre inflator, and the discipline to leave the laptop at home. I manage the last one about half the time.
Where the side projects live.
When I am not shipping for work, I am soldering something nobody asked for. The hobby half of all this lives in the Workshop on the build page.
Current bench residents: an ESP32 doorbell that announces visitors on the home speakers, a LoRa soil-moisture node for the balcony plants, and a power monitor on the water pump that has already saved one burnout. Most projects here start as a part ordered at midnight and end as a permanent fixture in the house that nobody else is allowed to touch.
See the Workshop