What Killercatfish is
A homestead-scale project with a suspicious amount of telemetry. Three small loops in a single house — aquaponics, bees, a raised bed — writing to one shared brain.
The first loop is Node Zero — a cold-water aquaponics cell in a basement in New England. A Raspberry Pi reads sensors every thirty seconds. A heater turns itself on when the water gets cold. Plants grow. Eventually fish do too. Node One is two hives in the backyard, going in this week. Node Two is a FarmBot raised bed in the side yard, assembling next week. Everything they do, they write down.
The point isn’t any one substrate. The point is that one house — basement, backyard, garden — is the smallest testable version of a much bigger idea: distributed, instrumented, community-scale food systems that teach themselves and each other. The archive is full of ways that idea could get larger — campuses, facilities, villages, 120 acres in Sandwich, New Hampshire. Those stay in the archive until the small loops are boring.
Who I am
I’m Josh. I teach online (math and CS), I’m working on a master’s in ML, and I spend my evenings soldering things in a basement. This site is the public face of a longer project — the private face is a personal knowledge base that logs everything from sensor readings to grading notes and decides what to remind me about tomorrow.
If the project has a thesis, it’s the one from the operations manual:
Get something alive before optimizing.
Everything else is a corollary.
How the site is organized
- HKOS — the three-loop architecture. Which substrates are running, which are still being built, and how they share a brain.
- Live — sensor readings from the running loops (Node Zero today; Node One and Node Two as their sensors come online).
- Start — an AI assistant that’s read the manual and the lessons learned. It helps you plan an aquaponics system for your space, your climate, your goals. Free to use, rate-limited so I don’t go bankrupt.
- Manual — the operations manual for Node Zero, licensed freely for non-commercial use. Everything I know about running a cold-water aquaponics system in a New England basement.
- Log — session-by-session build notes. Things I tried that worked. Things I tried that didn’t. A breadboard reliability saga.
- Archive — the concept pages from the previous version of this site. Devens Regenerative Campus, The 120 Acres, hockey flagship, regenerative villages. Still interesting. Mostly still unbuilt.
Contact
killercatfish@gmail.com is the fastest way. If you want to talk about aquaponics, bees, or instrumenting a backyard, I probably want to talk.