October 2025 Website Lobotomy

Yes, this website scored itself a major dressing-down and simplification. Why is that? Well, the site had been running on the same single-page WordPress theme for over 8 years and the designer who created it was clearly a novice at the time. I grew tired of fixing what they held together with band-aids, so I just decided to go with a bare-bones theme framework that others use to create new themes from.

Anyhoo, I’ve also changed gears a bit with the 3D G-Tower and Climate Czar stuff due to time constraints in my personal life. Other ventures on the Panhandle Ponics R&D website have put a dent in my free time. So I’ve stopped selling 4-packs of 3D G-Towers because I need the 3D printers for other products. However, I still sell singular trial towers to those who want to evaluate their implementation.

Climate Czar got a serious lobotomy this summer and is no longer a WordPress plugin. It’s now a stand-alone web app built on the same PHP and Bootstrap framework that runs the RPi Smart Still user interface. This change was required due to an increasing demand to make the server portion of it more friendly to Raspberry Pi (and clone) computers, and to simplify its usage with port forwarding.

Lastly, the CZ Combo Hub has also been rewritten and is temporarily not available from the Ordering page. The new hub will require a printed circuit board to be designed before I can sell them. Granted, I built the two in my greenhouse using breadboard style PCBs. However, these took nearly a week for each one, and I don’t have the free time to build those to order. Hang in there, they’ll be back soon!