Look up a remote control lawn mower on alibaba. They are tracked vehicles about 3 feet square and designed to traverse a 60% slope. You could probably order one without the lawnmower in it for cheaper. The tracked portion is electric with a gas engine for the mower.
They are about $600 before tariffs and shipping.
It may also be good at discouraging bears.
Have you looked at the site:
Yes. No help.
Alright, figured out the issue after using WireShark to sniff software that successfully controls the camera. After all the gnashing of teeth it turns out the reason most of my HTTP Requests were not working was because I had a “&” instead of a “?” in the URL. Or in other words, because I’m a big dummy.
And so is the AI I was using to help me troubleshoot…
It’s working now…
We are definitely looking into something like this. I just heard from the folks that sell the Burro Grande and it’s slick, but there doesn’t seem to be an API to interact with and control the thing locally. Just a web app. And it gets OTA updates every two weeks which gives me a bad feeling. I want more ability to tailor and control a 20K+ piece of equipment. And it has low ground clearance and might not do well in our terrain. If it was a bit higher and on tracks, would love to get one. It can tow 5000 pounds.
I finally got around to coding up some YOLO on my cameras around the property so now I have a male voice in the cabin piping up with “Alert, there is a bear/moose/wolf at location X.” Goes nicely with the female voice giving us updates on our solar production from time to time.
Got my YOLO going on the various cameras on the property and now instead of getting frequent motion updates from all the animals, a voice in the cabin just alerts us when a bear, moose, wolf, or other less likely threat is spotted on the property and where. “Alert, a bear has been detected outside the cabin.” Got that one earlier today, and then later today got an “Alert, a moose has been detected outside the cabin.” Just bought nine more PTZ cameras that are even better than the ones we have now and so I’ll be doing a lot of trenching.
Soon I’ll have Homestead HAL take voice prompts so we can tell him “we’re headed to the garden / saw mill” and it will have all the cameras do a sweep of the property and report back with any current threats or when and where the last one was observed, and then it will keep all the cameras looking at the entry/exit points for wherever we’re headed so we get timely info on any bears or moose that might be headed toward us. Then when we get back to the cabin it will go back to its usual sweeps.
I really like the cameras we have, but these new cameras are going to be much better. And I’m collecting quite a bit of footage of bears and moose and such so here before long I’ll be able to train my own YOLO model that should be far more accurate than the basic one I’m using now. And I’ll code it to give us special alerts when momma moose has calves (particularly dangerous) or when momma bear has cubs or when a male moose is spotted during the rut (terrifying).
Then I’ll be training a model for one camera to also include knowing when various berries are ripe, and scanning our muskeg to give us updates on when we can beat the bears to them. That bog is awesome, it’s huge and it feels like you’re walking on a mattress. It produces cloud berries (the Norwegians celebrate this berry and they’re pretty amazing), blueberries, and crow berries (which tastes like eating a forest, but maybe we’ll find a way to prepare them that is good). Mostly it’s about the cloud berries in the peat moss bog and once the blueberries are ripe there we’ll know to pick the blueberries on other parts of the property. We’ll have other cameras checking on the ripeness of red currants and watermelon berries and letting us know when fiddleheads and fireweed chutes have popped up.
And I cleared out more area for the five new solar arrays we’re installing this summer, since we’ll need all that power to produce the fire in the cables to the 5090 GPUs we’ll hopefully be buying soon…
Had a bear walk by the cabin earlier today but didn’t come up on the deck, he still got a rubber slug to his rear. Thirty minutes later, this bear came up on the deck.
You can hear my YOLO alerting me. Now I just need to get it to aim the shotgun because I think I missed this guy.
That’s brave of you, putting your lives in the “hands” of an LLM a neural network like that. At least if you get mauled and die you will be qualified for a Darwin award! 
Edit: Actually, what are you using for image classification? YOLO is an object detection algorithm if I understand correctly – that is, it only detects that an object is present and where it is, but it doesn’t do any classification?
Edit2: Nope, I got it wrong. YOLO is an algorithm based on neural networks that does both detection and classification.
In all seriousness: I hope you don’t grow complacent but rather act as if you didn’t have those cameras at all when you go outside.
“Alert, a bear has been detected eating you alive…”
I’m just using one of the standard YOLO models right now and it’s okay, but my custom model trained for each specific camera with its own footage of bears and such should be better. And we just ordered nine more cameras that are better than the ones we have now, so instead of just having the cabin covered and the property border covered, we’re going to have a nice intermediate ring around the cabin so we’ll have a good heads up on the bears before they get to the cabin. I’ll have the rubber slug ready for them before they get to the cabin.
Eventually I’m going to rig up some PTZ bear spray canisters so my system can give them a little spray as well.
A vicious animal got through my YOLO detection and into the cabin. Send help!
Not quite as remote, but I just finalized the purchase of 12kw of solar to put on top of 4 20ft and 1 40ft shipping containers that we use for storage. Each container has 5 to 12 395watt solar panels (new panels just under $0.19 per watt delivered). and its own dedicated string inverter. each container has its own air conditioner (it is humid here). I will eventually have every shipping container fully insulated with 3.5 inches of polyiso rigid foam boards. 2 are complete, 1 is 8 panels from complete, 1 is missing a wall, 1 has one panel. But the 2 complete ones when it is 96F outside, and the day starts at 68F, after 6 hours of no AC the inside is 74F.
That is awesome! Are you keeping lithium batteries in a container or is this all just to condition air for storage?
three inches of foam board for insulation is interesting to me, what is the r-value of the foam at that thickness? does it perform better than rockwool or similar?
in a few years im hoping to be able to do the same thing, and would love to hear more about how you made that choice.
additionally have you painted the top of the containers white or anything to reduce heat absorption?
It’s R-6 per inch during the summer, but only R-4.5 per inch on a cold day in winter. The insulating performance of polyisocyanurate insulation is significantly degraded at cold temperatures.
Cold-Weather Performance of Polyisocyanurate - GreenBuildingAdvisor
