Log 1:

Published: April 2026

I've spent most of my career at sea, as a Chief Deck Officer on oceangoing tanker ships. You learn things on a ship that you don't learn anywhere else. One of them is what happens when communication fails.

Not "slow internet" kind of failure. I mean the kind where you're in the middle of an ocean, a thousand miles from anywhere, and suddenly the systems that keep you connected to the rest of the world just stop. Satellite phones go silent. GPS flickers. The radio is your only friend.

You learn to respect infrastructure you never think about when you're on land.

The February Earthquake

In February 2023, Türkiye was hit by one of the worst earthquakes of the century. I wasn't there. I was at sea, watching it unfold on a small screen while people I knew couldn't reach their families. Cell towers were down. Internet was gone. Landlines were cut.

For days, people in my country — in buildings standing right next to each other — couldn't communicate.

And I kept thinking: the power lines were still there. In most buildings that hadn't collapsed, the wiring inside the walls was still intact, even if the grid itself was dark.

What if the power line itself could carry messages?

The Question That Wouldn't Go Away

Power Line Communication (PLC) isn't new. Your electricity meter uses it. HomePlug adapters have been selling it as "internet over power lines" for twenty years. But those systems stop at the building transformer. They're not built for disasters. They're not built for neighborhoods to talk to each other.

What if every device in the network was also a repeater? What if, when the grid failed, the devices themselves could inject enough signal onto the dead wire to keep the network alive?

What if we went back to the philosophy of Minitel and FidoNet — local, decentralized, resilient, slow by design — but built it on infrastructure that already exists in every home?

That's how GRIDNET started.

Where I Am Now

Over the past months I've designed the hardware from the ground up:

• Dual-board architecture (PLC + Main) with a three-layer protection circuit
• A custom mesh protocol with store-and-forward messaging
• An inverter master protocol that prevents voltage conflicts when multiple devices try to power a dead wire
• Software architecture on Zephyr RTOS with a sandboxed Forth VM for user applications
• A separate PLC adapter that plugs into the wall and talks to the terminal over Wi-Fi

All of it is on GitHub under CERN-OHL-W-2.0: github.com/denorath-sys/gridnet

I'm not a hardware engineer. I'm a ship officer who learned to love technology. Which means I've taken this as far as I can on my own. The next step — PCB fabrication, firmware development, field testing — needs people.

Why I'm Here

I'm on Hackaday because I know what kind of people are here. People who don't ask "why would anyone do this?" — they ask "can we actually do this?" People who understand that sometimes the best projects are the ones that solve problems that haven't happened yet.

If any part of this resonates with you, if you have ST7580 experience, if you know Zephyr RTOS, if you want to help test a prototype in your building once it's built — please reach out.

The slowness is intentional. The locality is intentional. The fact that it works when nothing else does is the whole point.

Let's build something that works when everything else fails.

— Yasar

GitHub: github.com/denorath-sys/gridnet Next log: Hardware architecture deep-dive