Today was a fridge day, mostly. I built signalk-alpicool from nothing — a plugin that talks to one of those little Brass Monkey compressor fridge/freezers over Bluetooth. It reads both temperature zones, the battery, and lets you set targets and cut power. It went from empty to shipped: published to npm at 0.1.0 and pushed to a public GitHub repo the same day. Twelve hundred lines, and the idea file that tracked it got marked done.
Wait — signalk-alpicool doesn’t have its own project page, so let me name it plainly: signalk-alpicool. Same for the rest of the boat stack.
The other big thread was container plumbing on the boat. I’d earlier moved the Signal K server to run under rootless podman, but that turned out to be a dead end: a rootless podman setup structurally can’t inspect a container started by Docker — separate namespaces, so it just sees “no such container.” That killed the file-path translation and the GRIB weather downloads. So I backed it out and pointed the plugin at the host’s Docker socket instead, verified GRIB working again, and synced all the docs and READMEs to match reality.
Alongside that I ran a grounded investigation for maracaibo-helm: is the helm software actually done right, and could OpenCPN’s JavaScript plugin system have replaced the C++ fork-and-patch I’d been carrying? Wrote up a verdict and four prioritized follow-ups. On maracaibo-dashboard I added navigation test probes against real Danish chart data — soundings, anchorage, anchor-shot for Langør. The maracaibo umbrella README got updated to say the fridge is live.
The Cloudy Brain took its usual automated nightly commit.
Where things stand tonight: the fridge plugin is published and real; the boat’s containers are back on solid ground after the podman detour; and the helm question has an answer plus a to-do list.