When my wife Lou and I first hit the road after selling our property in Oregon, I packed down my whole world into a couple of totes, and the stubborn belief that I’d eventually be able to rebuild the systems I once had running. Back then, I had temperature sensors tucked into every corner of our life — the cabin, the chicken coop, the dog area — all feeding into Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. I even had a few ESP32-CAMs quietly watching over things in the background.

We moved into our camper in January, back in Oregon, bouncing between state park campgrounds while we figured out our next move. By April, we were boondocking full-time in the state forests, learning how to live small while we waited for the right piece of land to show up. No more sensors. No more Raspberry Pi. No more dashboards. Just the laptop and the idea that, when we landed again, I’d bring all of it back. Not just to where it was — but better.

Now here we are, on our own land in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, real buildings going up, electricity running, and two websites finally built. It didn’t happen overnight. Once we landed here in the U.P., it still took a couple of years just to build up enough power and internet to even think about running anything full time. When you’re off-grid, everything has to come in the right order — water, heat, food, and then all the fun tech projects. We’ve been slowly working our way up from “we can run the lights for a few hours” to “okay, we can actually leave the system on while we sleep.”

Right now, we’re in the middle of that transition, shifting from turning the power off every time we leave or go to bed to finally being able to keep the whole thing running around the clock. And for the first time since we left Oregon, I have real places to put sensors again. More importantly, I finally have a reason to start documenting the rebuild properly — so you can follow along, try the projects yourself, and build your own version of this whole thing at home. It’s been a long road back to the point where any of this is even possible, and honestly, that’s part of what makes this series exciting. It feels like picking up a thread I had to set down years ago and finally getting to run with it again.

What This First Series Is About

This Raspberry Pi series is the foundation of the entire Tecnoagrarian project.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is the brain of the operation. From there, we’ll build outward into temperature sensors, cameras, energy monitors, controllers, automations, and eventually the big goal: a fully automated generator start/stop system that integrates with my battery bank run by Home Assistant OS.

But I’m not jumping straight to the complicated stuff.

We’re starting simple:

  • setting up the Raspberry Pi 5
  • installing Home Assistant operating system on the Raspberry Pi 5
  • basic sensors
  • basic controllers
  • simple ESP32 projects
  • getting real data flowing into the system again

Think of it as a slow, steady ramp-up. A handful of practical sensors, a few small wins, and a bunch of little building blocks that add up to a system you can actually trust — not the kind of smart-home fluff that falls apart the second the Wi-Fi hiccups or Amazon's web servers go down.

I’m not pretending I know exactly where this first series will go. We’re playing it by ear. The plan is to explore the hardware, show what’s possible, and keep every step replicable — so if you want to build the same thing, you can.

Why We’re Here: Owning the Stack

The thing that pushed me to actually start this project wasn’t the Raspberry Pi 5, or the sensors, or even the automation goal. It was the realization that if I don’t own my infrastructure, I don’t own anything.

Living off-grid makes this obvious. There’s no cloud server turning my lights on. No data center logging my camera footage. No company decides if I can access my own data. Everything that matters needs to live here, on our land, under our roof.

Owning your stack isn’t just a tech thing — it’s a homestead thing.
It’s the same mindset behind growing your own food, fixing your own gear, and building systems that don’t rely on someone else’s uptime.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is the doorway into that whole way of thinking. It’s small, affordable, flexible, and something anyone can learn to use if they give themselves time and stay curious.

And that’s the whole spirit of Tecnoagrarian: you don’t need permission to figure this stuff out. You just start. One little project at a time.

The Promise I’m Making

Half of this series is me showing you real builds — not theoretical, not lab-grade, not “in a perfect world.” The other half is the fact that this entire system will be powering our actual homestead. If something breaks, you’re going to hear about it. If something works beautifully, you’ll see the results.

Nothing here is staged.
Nothing is polished for the sake of polish.
It’s just real life, real builds, and a stack I’m rebuilding from zero with the same tools you can buy for yourself.

Where to Go Next

If you want to follow along, start with the next post: the Raspberry Pi unboxing.

From there, everything starts to take shape.

If you ever get stuck, curious, or want to try building your own version of these projects, let me know. I’m always happy to answer questions, share what I’ve learned, and help you get your own system running.

Let’s build this thing — one piece at a time.