welcome friends to pimp my Wi-Fi is that
how pimps talk i actually don't know but all i know is
pimp my Wi-Fi sounds an awful lot like pimp my wife
and that is not the same thing
so this be my neighbor john's house okay
i'll stop talking like that that's awful john runs a home business making sports
scoreboards that are both affordable to purchase and operate thanks to their
battery-backed solar-powered design and
they also operate in all weather conditions this is canada after all
radio control oh yeah that too my scoreboards are designed built and
assembled right here in canada the microcontroller chip that runs the
whole system is again designed and programmed by me
i've written the software to do this the printed circuit boards are again
designed by me the electronics and so on the pc boards themselves are built in
richmond bc they're sent back to me as a blank board i assemble the components in
it and test it right here then once all
that's done and tested and everything's okay i
build and assemble the coils right here again in the shop
well that's great john but what i couldn't help noticing when we were
working on that homemade CPU water block that let me cheat in scrapyard wars
season two is how horribly out of date
some of your gear was i mean
an athlon 64 pc running your cnc
usb drives to transfer files from one computer to
another are you still using this computer
the entire business business's backups are on a single hard drive
and are you still using the isp provided wireless access point with the name
telus 1995. i didn't think anyone had done that
since 1995.
no no i'm afraid i'll need to reject this reality and substitute my own which
is why we're here over a year later and
ubiquity networks the makers of the access point i ended up buying in simlim
square in pit my wi-fi episode 1 has
agreed to sponsor a full tech makeover
for my neighbor john even going as far as to send out one of their technicians
to make sure everything's running a-okay super hunky-dory and
paying for us to have mark the contractor uh help us with anything that
might involve power tools so let's get
crack-a-lacking let's run through the rationale behind the gear we're using
our UniFi security gateway pro is essentially a router that can be managed
from the UniFi controller it handles our packet processing and dhcp
our unify switch 8 handles both active and passive power over Ethernet with
enough ports for all of the devices we have on site
our UniFi ap pro wireless access points are designed to handle a much higher
client load but our deployment here is more about killer 802.11 ac coverage so
that dropped skype calls are a thing of the past and the UniFi cloud key is the
low power Linux computer on a stick that manages all these other network devices
to keep them working perfectly okay so obviously this has got to go um this is
a single access point it's up in the corner of the house i think i have
better reception from my house than john has in certain areas of his
house so here's what i'm thinking in
terms of getting full coverage in this place with i had planned for three
access points so i wanted one up here for wife approval factor
and that will mostly service the soundscape entertainment sound
recording studio in there and one of the kids bedrooms
because there will be a hard line in the master bedroom for the computer that
they operate there so if we have slightly less reception to the master
then it's not the end of the world i wanted to put it here
the wife gave that gave that feel absolutely no
way okay so that'll probably do the upstairs
right what can i it should okay you should easily cover the upstairs okay
for the downstairs to keep cabling simple i wanted to have the access point
in the garage which is just on the other side of this wall
so that means great strength for where the business is operating that should
cover this living room area really well
now we've got one two three walls between it
and the den however
we want to bring one more out of the crawl space
and put it here to cover the backyard and then i'm thinking hopefully
the back half of the bottom floor oh yeah so the cable runs that those gentlemen
are getting going up there are all going to come down to this corner behind me
where we're going to have Ubiquiti's edge router light we're gonna have one
of their PoE switches so that we don't have to run additional power to all of
our access points we're gonna have a proper nas with real-time redundancy and
finally we're gonna have one of their little controller doodads that makes it
so we don't have to have a dedicated pc to handle seamless handoff from access
point to access point while clients are roaming around the house
so the great thing about any tech project is you don't have to create
drama like you do with a lot of reality shows
the plan was to have an adsl line down here so we could move our networking
stuff downstairs and run everything out from there into the crawl space
but we actually don't know if either of these phone lines are live
okay so i'm going up to see if i can find out where those cables terminate so
i got to go i don't know what about 10 feet over
that way okay oh ow my head
oh crap there's a okay there's not a clear path
there's there's a kind of a wall here like a not kind of a there's literally a
wall so give me a moment
try not to fall through the ceiling
pull what we call a dennis here
you know what no i think i got him i think i got him i think i see uh
i think i see what's going on here so it looks like only two are connected
the two of the wire pairs on the beige cables yeah
okay so that would explain it because you need four pairs for uh voice and
data okay cool so all we gotta do is lines connect them
then right there we go okay
so that's how that goes over to that corner
uh one of them is actually in this um
this guy so one of them has uh let me have a look
yeah that's that's it hold on
this one coming in here so that one looks like it has three
wires connected oops the older installations they didn't
actually have to use like a go by the actual standard color coding
so you could get one color that is this but it's actually it has another
purpose great
well i can tell you right now these colors look to be kind of random because
the red and the green are not connected to red and green on the other side i don't think okay so what i just need to
go up there with a roll of electrical tape and twist them together or
no it's not ideal um it might work but
um it's apparently what was done in the first place i do see that
i can't get into how reliable that would be for data if it did work well it
stopped working so about that reliable yes
we can certainly try and see what happens we can try it and see if it works immediately now yes and then we
can twist some caps on it and make sure it doesn't go anywhere at that point
so do you want me to go back up there and uh start twisting wires together or sure we
can we can try that and the other thing is if we had the
i don't know how accessible that room is he's running the line to do the closet
uh oh no but there won't be any easy way to get it down the wall and out yeah not really
not tidy anyway it's not life approved yeah
so that's why we didn't want the uh the networking closet upstairs
some some thought was given to this just not quite enough
just the line is tech tips way
red to red green to green good so far
huh it looks like the black came off okay so this is an improvement over
before it's flashing faster now let's see
do it for sync do we want solid hey
we've got a line okay all right my uh my ghetto pimp style
just twist them together i mean we'll fix it but um awesome that'll work for
now good one problem solved let's just wait
for the next one to happen so behind me in progress we've got
george leading the charge on creating a custom enclosure for that cnc mill that
we used to create the custom water block that should dampen some of the noise
that comes out of it allowing john to have it running during the night
something that he currently cannot do due to noise regulations in this
neighborhood so in summary what george is going to be building is a 2x4
construction shroud that's going to allow for all the existing functionality
so easy access to things like these uh drive bands here in case they need to be
replaced the ability for the hose to continue to take away the waste material
while the machine is working and most importantly a complete enclosure with
you know baffles for exhaust vents to take away as much of
the noise as possible so we've got half of our Ethernet runs
done these are the ones to the master bedroom as well as the closet upstairs
all that's left now is the one that goes through the crawl space out to the back
and a surprise one that goes over to where the new adsl line comes in to
where the networking closet is going to be here in this corner so i actually
wouldn't mind getting in here to do the actual pc upgrade
mercifully the old one has been apparently taken out back and shot
because it's not here anymore but mike is currently working on just getting all
the latest firmwares running on the security gateway the PoE switch and the
cloud controller so i'm gonna go shopping
so these are gonna run the cnc mill as well as the coil winding machine
and they should be just much smaller uh
quieter there's no fans so they're less likely to collect us should be a better
overall solution not to mention they're faster
i swear if you want Windows update to do something be in a hurry
all right let's do this thing
i'll take one of these actually no i'm kidding i'll take a couple of the ve-247s here
one and
two
so we've run into a small problem i just kind of assumed we could get a monitor
ARM at best buy but brandon looked it up and everything's online only
so i don't know where to buy a monitor ARM
well try visions but honestly i don't have a lot of hope
for this well then i will take them thank you good sir here you go
this is a lot more than i wanted to pay but
these do look really nice and these should work perfectly
for what we need and they had exactly two
so that just saved my bacon we now have everything we need
we're ready to head back to the job site
that's typical right you go away for an hour because you got to buy something
you come back where is everybody
must be on lunch all right okay so these are all programmed yes
they are okay so why don't we go ahead
and these ones we'll deal with in the corner
once praxis is done with his wiring up there but why don't we go ahead and install
these then all right let's do it
i got this i got this got this bro
but i might have to take off my pimp sunglasses because i can't see a damn thing
are you gonna fit in there with your hat on he's trying to get me to take off the
hat no don't do it but no i'm not taking off the hat
taking off the hat is the wrong thing to do for any pimp pimp always wears his hat
okay so we're just basically a two by four just a cut off just a small cut off
keep going until it starts teeter-totter beautiful right there
now i can take the two by four right here there you go and then we can
slide it right on okay excellent
excellent good good slow and easy voice
and slide it to the back there and we're going to slide it off
okay beautiful on the edges here yeah okay
back there all right yeah could we have um
it might make our lives a little bit easier if once we've got it up this
slides away john oh awesome thank you okay okay guys
pull it out pull it out go ahead let it down straight down there
you go oh we did it guys okay now we want to center it
yep your way
yeah we just right there
take the two by fours out we're good
cut this guy right now so okay yep
yep and then we'll lift this side and do the same let's see
because when this is when this sucker is spinning it vibrates quite a bit
okay so while those guys finish up the box for the cnc i'm gonna go ahead and
get started on rolling out all of the other gear that i have so i've got
the zotac pcs all loaded up with fresh copies of Windows 10
wireless mouse a brand new laptop it's a
ux303 from ASUS as well as
yes from our friends over at seagate and synology we've got a new nas that is
going to have four terabytes of raid 1 storage so
time to get cracking on that so i'm not sure 100 exactly how it works
but it looks like uh
yeah it looks like it kind of clips in somehow
and then just slides on
so george and his guys have made about three metric but tons of progress on the
enclosure over here check this out the monitor ARM is installed the
keyboard and mouse are on this gorgeous little tray that george
stress tested so to speak to make sure it's strong enough to hold a keyboard
and mouse and we've got more progress over here in
the corner mike over here has terminated most of the Ethernet jacks which means
that we're almost ready to switch between the old network and the new one
but first we have to do the before of
our before and after test so in a nutshell we're going around to four
different locations the workshop the upstairs audio room the dining room
here where i saw john using his computer to have a voip call and the pool side
and we're doing four tests in each location we're doing a file transfer
test we're using insider to see what the actual signal strength is in decibels
and we're using that same software to see
how many overlapping wireless networks there are in each of those locations
because the reality of it is even if it's performing fine right now in the
middle of the day on a wednesday when everyone gets home and they start
streaming netflix those 2.4 gigahertz networks that are nearby are gonna cause
interference and hurt john's network's performance that's one of the reasons
we're switching over to five gigahertz
so with all the before testing done all that's really left now is for mike to
finish up his Ethernet terminations and for me to mount the last access point
up here in the corner of the garage slash workshop
uh yeah we're ready i've done all my before tests
okay so our server closet is up and running
we can access either the UniFi cloud key
configuration which we shouldn't need to do because mike's gone ahead and set all
that up or we can access the UniFi controller which is what is effectively
running on that so we're going to go ahead and manage that and make sure that
all of our aps are showing up that that is going to be key here
and there you have it three aps
closet garage and outdoor and
the next step before we do our test our performance test
is actually this is a really cool feature you go into rf environment
and you can pick either 2.4 gigahertz or 5 gigahertz and do a scan it takes about
5 minutes but this kind of thing is worth it if you're trying to avoid using
the same channels as everybody around you and you want the best possible
performance on your network at all times i'd recommend doing a scan like this
during a time when your neighbors are likely to be actually using their
internet so sometime around seven to nine pm in the evening
so we're finally done we've actually been waiting a few weeks for some
acoustic panels for the inside of the
cnc enclosure but i am ready to present
you guys with our wireless signal strength tests so by the pool side
much much stronger you can actually browse the internet at full speed from
out there whereas i couldn't even get a connection to the old wi-fi access point
from the dining room table we're looking at an improvement there as well same
thing here in the warehouse so wireless signal strength has improved overall but
that wasn't the only thing we were doing here we were improving the ergonomics of
this workstation which as you can tell has definitely been dramatically
improved and second of all we were improving the
acoustics of this workstation so this enclosure is now pretty much done
it still needs a little bit more acoustic foam but we are ready to do a
before and after test and find out if john's productivity can improve thanks
to being able to operate the cnc at night so we're gonna head outside and do
a before and after sound test with the panel open versus having the panel
closed and see if we can hear the difference all right john fire it up for
the before test
i don't know if he's gonna be able to hear me okay john close it down
sorry i was saying close the lid
so it's pretty loud
not bad can the mic pick that up
not bad at all awesome all right so mission accomplished thank
you for checking out the second ever episode of pimp my Wi-Fi let me know what
you guys would like to see if we were to do a third episode of this series
see you guys later you know it is
is that how they walk