Hacking the Sonos Ray - Part 1: the Teardown
The Sonos Ray is the cheapest and simplest soundbar made by Sonos. Slightly more expensive than the price of two Symfonisks but with an optical audio input and IR receiver, I was curious to see if thi...
Fosi Audio BT30D 2.1 amplifier - the awesome little amp I returned
I'm a bit of a fan of the small chip amps made by Fosi Audio, at my desk I've got the ZK-502T powering a set of 4 speakers, 2 giant floor standing speakers with 12" drivers wired in parallel with a se...
Warming up LED garden lights
At some point in the last decade Arlec and Click decided to rain down a form of terror upon us all unlike the world had ever seen before. Of course I'm talking about 4000k+ LED garden lights which som...
Nissan X-Trail T31 Roof mounted solar panel
One of our lockdown projects in 2020 was to install a solar battery system and drawer fridge into the back of our Nissan X-Trail. The mission is to have a fridge that's ready to fire up whenever we ha...
Reinforcing the wings
When we initially took the Topagee out for a camp we noticed that the plywood bed bases that fold out from the sides were supported only by two steel bars pinning into the chassis. We're pretty light ...
D.I.Y. Apple W1 bluetooth earphones
Beats X launched in November 2018 and I bought it 1 week later at my local Harvey Norman. I hated them. In-ear buds aren't for me, it feels like I'm in a swimming pool whenever I'm using them. I tried...
A history lesson
Usually I research stuff before I buy it but the Topagee was one of those things where I didn't really care where it came from or how it was made, I just knew I wanted to give it a home. Recently I've...
The Weigh in
9:48am Thursday 6th of January 2021 It's Thursday morning as I arrive to a green tin shack on the side of an agricultural warehouse in Kyneton. Framed by two rusty stakes in the dried out grass, I pee...
Adventure numero-uno
Before I grab the sawzall and start hacking away at the Topagee, it's probably a good idea for us to take it camping in its raw, unadulterated, newly purchased state to see just what we've got here. F...
Introducing: The Topagee Camper Project
In 2021, my partner and I moved to Castlemaine in the Victorian countryside and as a result, started using our car a whole lot more. Up until then our car was almost exclusively used for camping and k...