Lightning Goats started with a simple idea: let anyone in the world use Lightning to feed real goats and watch it happen live.
The feeder is still running, but the project has grown well beyond that.
We use Lightning Goats as a real-world test environment for Bitcoin infrastructure. Keeping a payment-controlled physical system reliable has led us into LNbits extensions, a Strike backend for LNbits, livestream messaging, and CLN plugins like cl_revenue_ops.
The goats are what people see. LNbits and Core Lightning are part of what makes it work.
We also live and operate from an off-grid Earthship powered by solar, with independent water, heating, networking, automation, and computing systems.
The same basic ideas connect all of it:
Understand the systems we depend on.
Reduce unnecessary dependencies.
Use limited resources efficiently.
Keep control local.
Build things that can be repaired, improved, and reused.
Off-grid solar infrastructure is expensive. Panels, batteries, inverters, generators, monitoring, maintenance, and replacement costs all add up.
Projects like Lightning Goats help reduce the effective cost of that infrastructure by making it productive.
The same solar system that powers the house also powers a Lightning node, servers, the goat livestream, payment-controlled automation, open-source development, and remote work.
That does not mean feeding goats or routing sats pays for an entire Earthship. It means the infrastructure does more than one job.
Solar powers the home and revenue-producing services. Open-source software reduces platform costs. Bitcoin lets a remote property receive payments from anywhere. Monitoring and automation can catch problems before they become expensive.
Off-grid does not have to mean economically disconnected.
Our version of solarpunk is less about futuristic imagery and more about making the engineering and economics work: batteries, water, servers, Lightning liquidity, software, animals, maintenance, and open-source tools.
Lightning Goats is one small example of what can happen when locally produced energy, Bitcoin, open-source software, and physical infrastructure are designed to work together.
Watch and feed the goats:
Lightning Goats
⚡ Lightning Goats ⚡
The Lightning Goats bitcoin-powered interactive goat feeder is open for business. Send treats using the QR code, zap the herd on Nostr, or send sat...
Code:
GitHub
Lightning Goats
Lightning Goats has 12 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.
GitHub
santyr - Repositories
Freelance Pedestrian. santyr has 17 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.
