OFF-GRID Living in a Tropical Paradise Ep 78 

Handmade by robots you and the family were most hospitable. Thank you for the opportunity to learn. We had the most thought provoking and interesting conversations. Raoul's stories were such a treat. The food!!! Oh the food:) Michal and I look forward to seeing more of your vision materialize. Truly a special place you and your family have built.

A multilingual engineer who does JSON, with a 3d printing facility in the middle of the jungle.... When do we see the footage of the secret sat-com / death ray facility hidden inside the hollowed out mountain? Truly outstanding.

@@Bumsonaboat "Family?" Didn't Charlie Manson's people call themselves "family" as well? ;-) More seriously, every generation seems to come up with their own version of a Utopian commune, too bad they never last...

If he's not the Mayor, there's no way that town will ever get a drive thru.

Every member of this family is exceptionally intelligent and resourceful.

Ash thomas thanks for taking the time to watch it. This one was quite a bit longer than the normal episode but there was so much to share.

Exactly! It appears that it is possible to make the best out of any situation. We truly will miss this place.

Put a ring on it dude ! 'Settle down right there and have some kids so you can be unhappy forever ! lol

Still bitter but I think its obvious that Michal absolutely smoked me.

Lol. Awesome!

Yea it sparks an interesting conversation. They are completely independent of an electric grid and water source although they still buy drinking water from local businesses and utilize the internet plus use products that have been manufactured elsewhere. It is hard to define Truly off the grid in this era. Most anyone would use solar panels to assist in off grid living but if you argue that using manufactured products means your not off grid then solar could not be used.

Plenty random and awesome scenes from behind too !

Kind of the Bums thing

Its nice to hear you enjoyed it. LOL Lola always has a good time. Thanks for watching.

He is the father of a sailor friend of ours who is here in Luperon. The couple is our age and are experts in the sailing world. They invited us out to meet the family and check out the farm. Thanks for watching.

Cool we will check it out. Thanks Unc

We just need some catchy theme music. I've noticed the similarities....its kind of a running joke here. It's going to be really complete when we put in our dry-ice manufacturing plant to utilize our occasional solar power surplus lol.

Exactly, the more Michal and I talk about it the more muddy our concept of "off grid" gets. What you all have done thus far is incredible and we are excited to see Vista del Mar in the upcoming years. Couldn't bring a more highly motivated and capable group of individuals together.

You guys sure use a lot of petroleum based materials, are you going to drill your own oil wells and build your own cracking towers?

Hmm this brings up an interesting topic. When we looked up off-grid it mainly focused on the electrical grid however it also says, "not relying on public utilities". I supposed the argument could be made that internet is part of "The Grid" as well as mechanical suppliers.

@@Bumsonaboat I think "off grid" was a meaningful way to say "disconnected from the world" up until about 2000. Nowadays, if you have Internet, you are connected to a global supply network and are certainly not "off grid" in the same sense.

We certainly take advantage of high technology when it can improve efficiencies, safety, comfort, or productivity.... but even back when we were hauling water with the horses we were not so bad off lol. We started with pretty humble beginnings, leveraging my experience growing up with homestead life in Alaska. I've got to tell you though, water and the power to move it is the lifeblood of civilized existence. Pumps and power, baby. I'm always coming up with ways to make power or move water even if we had to build it all from wood, bamboo, and whatever I could cast out of steel or aluminum scrap. We have wind here too, so I've been low-key working on a compressed air system powered by wind to pump water for a while now....no eBay required lol. That said, if you took away my 3d printer, I would really miss it. it makes life here soooooo much easier lol. If you're into 3d printing, you might check out the book on Amazon - "Functional design for 3d Printing - 3rd edition".

Exactly, I believe that is part of it but that would only scratch the surface.

I couldn't agree more. Water, power, automation - in that order. As far as the IOT and microgrid infrastructure, I'm an autodidact with long experience in programming, digital circuit design, and lightweight electronic engineering. Don't ask me to solve your high-frequency RF circuit design stuff, ill be all like "well that looks like a diode? right? did you check the ground plane? Why is this circuit trace just hanging there? lol"

@@atrumscientia Wait...you're not a ham? and on top of that mountain? and not EE? I am disappoint (jk, you are having too much fun)

@@stimpsonjcat67 Actually, I'm getting my technician licence as soon as I get back to the states. Finally have a good enough reason to get it lol. I always used to balk at getting proficient with Morse, but these days there's really no excuse. Yeah, I've been too busy doing things my whole life to really take a few years out to go to school for something as narrow as EE, but if I really wanted the ticket I could probably test most of the way. I've done it all both personally and professionally.... Just never bothered to get the t-shirt. Too many things to DO in the world lol. As it is, I've been involved in some very interesting projects, in such a wide variety of fields.... I've had the privilege of working with some extremely talented people and learning so much. As I look back on the last half century, I can honestly say I've no regrets, anything I would have chosen differently would have closed off other cherished paths. There is just so much to learn, to experience, to share, and to teach.

We did not but this brings up a good point about the drinking water. They actually have plans to build a water treatment facility but for now the water from the well is used for all things other than drinking. They buy 5 gallon barrels of drinking water just like we do here on the boat. Cool to hear that you also use a 3d printer. Admittedly I know very little about them but they are so fascinating.

Hi Stimpsonj! We actually use JSON over HTTP rather than MQTT at this point, to make the whole network human readable. We'll probably be adding MQTT to the mix though as we move to an on-site dashboard server. I really like to be able to just pop open a browser on my phone and see the actual data a sensor is sending, so we'll probably keep HTTP in the mix even as we take advantage of the advantages of the MQTT subscription model. In this context, the "broker" collects up sensor data from the sensor directory, then "brokers" it to the data consuming devices in the format that is most useful to them. For instance, in the first phase of implementing MQTT, we will deploy a server (an ESP8266 lol) that will read the data available on the "local" broker and send it over to the dashboard server (probably a little ARM SBC) via MQTT. Each broker also serves as a backup distribution point, so as we add more, the data collection and distribution fabric becomes more robust. Part of what we are trying to achieve with the human-interactive protocol is to keep everything real-time troubleshootable without a single point of failure. Every (critical) system we have monitoring or control on can also function without the intelligent control, falling back on switches, relays, and simple electromechanical control if the intelligent systems fail. Without the sensor net, we lose a lot of efficiencies and optimizations, but the important stuff will work even if a lightning strike takes out the integration. One of the things we're excited about is implementing some neural network controls with tensorflow lite on our new MAIX-BIT controllers. At only 10 bucks a pop, we'll be able to play around to see if we can find some good "AI on the edge" applications that can bring useful enhancements or features. One Idea I'm working on is using an AI camera to watch the sky to predict when panel shading from clouds will occur a few seconds or minutes before it actually happens, allowing us to optimize our storage use by top-loading a little right before a transient negative flow. We're looking at a lot of little stuff like that where a little AI magic might pick up a small efficiency or reduce fragility.

@@atrumscientia hit me up via my about info email address and I will put together a care package for you with some lovely tech in it I think you will like.

As is the entire family.

It is our pleasure to share. I believe they do and they also have plans to house people who want to invest time in research or projects. They will provide shelter and food at an extremely low cost or even exchange for the use of finished projects and or research.

Thanks, we spent the rest of the week cleaning and organizing for our on sanity. We will begin cutting into the cockpit floor to replace the core next.

LOL guessing when I was eating the seed instead of sucking the fruit off.

The raw cacao face was really great. It was all I could do not to ruin the moment by busting out laughing. Joel is such a great sport, he was all like...yeah, this is *d e l i c i o u s* . lol To be fair the fruit is really tasty....but you just suck it off of the seeds, which are more bitter than unsweetened chocolte lol.

Yeah I would want to live there with no clean water, AC, modern bathroom, ECT.

@@MegaBait1616 Did you see the state of those people, my god - they looked like they covered themselves in dirt and jumped through a tar pit. They were so dishevelled that they almost looked like Californians, New Yorkers, .... _Canadians_ *ETC.*

@@user-tt5js4bh2v lol. yup.

We use a lot of tech, but at its core, the farm runs on the sun, water, and the means to move it. We were doing basically the same stuff only less efficiently before I had the chance to invest some time in picking up the inefficiencies in resource use and labor by leveraging my technical background. As it is, things work here even if the tech breaks (which sometimes it does lol) and it can all ultimately be operated by anyone who knows how to hook up wires, do some plumbing, and can troubleshoot out small village sized utility plants. Without the shiny stuff, it just works less efficiently and requires more manual operation.

When we say "off the grid", we refer to being off the local electrical utility, as we have our own power plant and distribution; and also our own water supply. What's not apparent in the video is the amount of infrastructure that we have put in, from the well, to a very large tank above, to the distributed mini water utility that feeds running water to all the buildings and irrigates our nursery and botanical garden, the solar water heater, etc. We are high tech, but everything we develop here is with a close eye on repeatability. Ralchap, facilities and infrastructure manager.

@@raoulchapman7310 as you said, we didn't even come close to showing a full picture of what has been accomplished here. It was our goal to give a glimpse into life at Vista Del Mar and it took 26 minutes to simply do that. We doubled the time of our average episodes and part of me regrets not just going as long as needed. This could have been easily over an hour and that is just the footage we captured which left out so much.

Yea, which is why I had some fun there. Nobody was fooled.

Then do it. Ohhhh it’s a ton of work? Never mind

Where is that exactly ? What are you growing out there ? Can we come in and see you sometime?

@@yuccaken haha idk about internet strangers but check out wrolranch on Instagram I'm in the process of building my house

Cool ! Thx I will. Cheers !

Dominican Republic

LOL yea I (Joel) got smoked. It wasn't even close.

Good eye mate

@@Bumsonaboat even while multi tasking

I know, right? that guy in the red and white shirt has such a terrible video voice. He should get some voice training and at least learn how to stay on topic. Kudos to J&M for putting up with him lol.

Right!!?? We 🤯

LOL....Yea us too

Yikes

It's a little different than Jonestown here, in that its bring your own ideology and koolaid. If you don't bring one, that's fine too. Just try to do something vaguely useful for the future of humanity, and keep the cray-cray to yourself lol.

There is definitely a creepy similarity to the dominant male fanatic.... it sure turned me off!

Seems to me, things are rather good as history goes. If you've ever been here, which I'm afraid I don't remember if you have, I'm sure somehow you got the wrong impression lol.

Good One ! Well said !

They got out alive lol.

@@atrumscientia Not only that ... they are "Living". Great to see the tech applied, amazing the low cost of those components.

@@waikikin yes they are, unlike so many that only dream and never take the risk required to act. Hats off to them and to everyone who has the courage not only to dream, but to step off of the precipice of security and lunge headlong into the great uncertainty of a life unscripted.