Author / Warren

by Warren

ADS-B Update

The weather cooperated enough for me to mount the 1090mhz antenna onto the side of the house and run the cable up through the soffit into the garage attic. I previously swapped the light fixture in the garage for a 6-plug outlet to run the work lights, so I was able to connect into that for the power.

I’ll be interested to see how this FlightFeeder Orange Box operates in the garage attic during the summer here in Texas. It’s passively cooled for now, but I might have to setup a temp-controlled fan for the hottest days. We’ll see.

Initial results are definitely better than when I was testing it with the antenna in the upstairs window. I’m picking up aircraft over 150NM away – in Dallas.

by Warren

Full Self Driving (Beta)

Yesterday I received the notification that there was an update for the Model Y. I had been anticipating this update – it’s the “holiday” update that Tesla pushes out with some fun features like in-cabin camera viewing. I quickly got the process started and let it go until this morning.

As I was sitting on the couch having coffee with the Tesla app open, trying to see if I could get the in-cabin camera to appear, I realized that the FSD driving score feature in the app wasn’t there anymore. Huh? Could it be – did I really get approved into the FSD beta?

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by Warren

Network Upgrades

Not that our network needed any updating, we’ve been running the Ubiquiti Cloud Key Gen2 and USG Pro gateway and it’s been solid. But I like to keep up to date with the latest and greatest products and while the newer Dream Machine line of products has been out for a couple of years I figured it’s had some time to work the initial bugs out. I picked up the Dream Machine Pro Special Edition, which replaces the cloud key and gateway, and decided to give it a go.

Ubiquiti’s promise of an easy migration proved to be true, to my surprise. I backed up the settings on the old system before decommissioning, and imported the file into the new system. After import and re-adoption of the devices, things were up and running with very little input from me. VLAN’s, firewall rules, etc. – all migrated and running. I was surprised at how quick things went.

The UDM Pro SE has a nifty feature that utilizes an app on a smartphone in concert with the UDM Pro to realtime map the floor-plan of your location and overlay the map with wifi signal strength gradients. Once the network was back up and online, I started to do the walk around to map out the house:

This is a screenshot of the app, the map is the floor-plan of the upstairs of our house. (I have an iPhone 14 Pro Max.) The worst coverage on this is the master bedroom, right in the center of the bed. As I’m typing this, I’m sitting there now, and the signal is solid – to give some context to the strength relativity. The upstairs AP is on the wall right above my desk, where the icon of me standing is in the screenshot.

One unanticipated side effect of real time mapping a floor-plan is how the the software handles mirrors. This app essentially doubled the room size when it scanned the mirror, and it posed an interesting problem to me of how one could handle that.

Ubiquiti also rolled out an augmented reality feature with their new line of products, but unfortunately I needed to have upgraded my switch to support it. I have no need whatsoever to upgrade, but I’m thinking about it just for this feature alone. Here’s an example of what it can do, show an overlay of the ports and what devices are plugged into them:

by Warren

PiVPN + Wireguard

When Chris at Crosstalk Solutions posted a video on how to setup a VPN on a Raspberry Pi, I knew what my unused Pi was going to be used for.

This post isn’t going into the details, Chris’ video covers that, but I did have a chance to use the VPN while traveling over the Easter holiday. We were visiting relatives in South Carolina and I took the opportunity to connect via my MBP with the Wireguard client installed. As expected, I was on my home network and able to access everything I had previously setup access to. The connection was fast, as well.

by Warren

Tesla App Charging Stats

A little over a month ago(ish), Tesla released an update to their phone app that included accumulated charging statistics. More than just tracking the charging data, Tesla structured the metrics to also give you an idea of how much you are saving by not filling up with regular gas. There’s no way to set the price of the gas, and the help page states:

Tesla has assumed a fuel economy of 28 miles per gallon for Model 3 and Model Y…

You can set the energy cost that your home charger is using. Since Austin Energy uses a tiered pricing schedule, I looked up my historical billing and set my cost to $0.11 kWh.

Today marks 31 days of having this data:

Looking back, I’d say this was a pretty typical month for us. Total mileage was ~771 miles. The February 19th spike on the bar chart was charging up to 100% for a quick trip to San Antonio. Otherwise the max charge level I keep is at 80-90%.

Pulling up my TeslaMate dashboards, and the “Cost per 100 mi” stat is showing 4.10. Multiplying that with the mileage of 771 comes out to 3161, or $31.61, which is within a gnat’s hair of the Total Spent metric in the screenshot above. I’m betting the app does some rounding and/or the data cut-off was slightly different from TeslaMate.

All in all, the new Charge Stats screen is a nice update that surfaces more of the data that we know is out there to be sliced and diced. It’s nice to know that I can quickly call this up for a glance rather than needing to refer to the TeslaMate dashboards.

And right now, in March 2022, that Gas Savings metric has got to be a huge boon to any Tesla owner.