Sorry about the slop, good luck wading

“Monster” was definitely facetious, hope you’re having a nice day friend :)

My uncle got an old road maintenance truck, I hooked the spotlight/flashers back up and added a PA. He loves hitting the flashers anywhere he pulls up, hassling people working outside with the PA, and spotlighting deer/drunk kids in the field. Your dad is a monster

Clearly you should turn it into a gift for me, that’s generations newer than the headless laptop I’m using now lol. Fr tho, find someone who’ll appreciate it. Way too nice a rig to languish as a 3rd server/media box

How realistic this is really depends on the individual, but converting dead ICE vehicles to EV is a thing. Easier on some cars than others, but old body on frame stuff is pretty darn straightforward (not to mention cool). Early 2000’s Ford Ranger + around 10k USD and maybe a hundred hours of tinkering would get you a ride imo both cooler and more practical than anything you can buy off the lot

You got causality reversed here man. They’re military infrastructure, the chatbot slop is just sugar coating

Mine goes up to ~15%, suck it peasants. The system works, change nothing

“Everyone” does not use their phone while eating or pooping. I make an effort to engage with mine as little as possible, in a perfect world checking it when I wake up when I get home and before bed. For me the phone is a weird mix of useful tool and addictive drug, almost impossible to drop entirely but very much worth limiting access to. Constant stimulation is certainly a choice you can make, but probably not a healthy one. I view what you’re doing the same way you might view someone saying they always drink a beer in the shower.

What differentiates PipePipe? I really liked Tubular, which was NewPipe+SponsorBlock, but it quit getting updates

I haven’t had access to grid power in over 10 years and am pretty familiar with this stuff as part of day to day life. I do now have solar. Really don’t think me and everyone else I know have been getting this consistently “lucky” for this long across such a wide range of devices. The 11-15v a nominal 12v battery system normally experiences is not a huge amount of fluctuation, and I have yet to encounter a 12v device that couldn’t take it. On the contrary, I’ve tried much dumber stuff and gotten away with it. There’s a 9v piano keyboard and a 19v computer monitor wired straight into that same battery. The only time I’ve actually killed something is by reversing polarity. Voltage too low=won’t turn on, voltage too high=gets hot, and all these years of wiring up random scavengings to see what happens have taught me most gear is surprisingly tolerant/resilient

e: for SBC stuff, automotive USB charger makes a great 5v rail. My “homelab” was at one point a pi 3b and a 5v Buffalo wifi router running dd-wrt plugged into a cigarette lighter

Hey, I have a lot of appreciation for the infrastructure you maintain so don’t take this the wrong way: you’re very confidently overcomplicating this one all over the thread. People run nominal 12v stuff direct from battery all the time and it’s fine. It’s the norm in RVs, boats, and off-grid housing. There’s usually quite a bit of wiggle room. The router I’m using right now won’t actually cut out until ~8v and sees almost 16 during my ancient lead acid battery’s eq cycles. It’s completely fine and has been for years. Not industrial or automotive grade by any means, a low-end Netgear from the thrift store.

You also state “while there is DC power the battery in a UPS isn’t used”. Assuming you mean AC that’s still not quite correct, it’s always being charged at least a little and tapping it for DC is perfectly fine.

That’s my advice to op, and a setup I’ve run before: replace the 12v battery attached to their existing UPS and wire the router/any other 12v devices right to it. A UPS is just a nicely packaged battery charger/inverter/transfer switch. Wiring them to larger/cheaper batteries that don’t happen to fit their casings is also entirely viable, as is running either of their outputs to a load panel. Sky’s the limit :)