I have a pile of random screws, nuts, bolts, and washers in my shop. I buy little bags or boxes of random sizes of things, use a third of them, and then the bags sit around forever because they are such a mess that I can never find them when I need them. The whole thing seemed so random that I never really put much time into looking for an organization system, but now that I have 3D printer, I have the ability to custom make exactly what I need!
A couple of months ago, Zack Freedman released his “Gridfinity” system. The system is based on a grid of baseplates and then each bin/holder can be easily stacked in various combinations. I was downloaded exactly the bins I wanted, customized his model to make some new bins, and made a series of prints that resulted in a lot more organization. This is a project that I’ll keep adding to, but for now it feels good to have brought some order to the chaos. Not bad for ~$10 in filament!
“How do you like your new car?” A lot of people have asked me that question and as a thousand thoughts rush through my head, I try to come up with something quick that won’t overwhelm them. There’s the obvious “It’s nice not paying $5.60/gallon for gas,” but it doesn’t seem nice to rub their face in it, so I usually talk about how nice to not worry about it dripping oil or needing service beyond tire rotations and brake checks.
But here on the blog, let’s dive in a bit deeper and share more thoughts after about a month of ownership. Let’s start with the pros:
Cars lose a huge amount of their value as soon as you drive them off the lot, but Kelly Blue Book says that my car is currently worth $4000 more than I paid after taxes, and that’s just the trade-in value. So even if all the naysayers are right, I can change my mind and make money on the experiment.
We have the car set to a schedule so it automatically wakes up before we leave the house and warms or cools the interior to our preset temperature. It’s convenient, but it also helps save battery since it can do this while plugged in at home.
Traffic Aware Cruise Control and Autopilot are awesome! We’ve never had a car with fancy cruise control before, so just being able to have the car speed up and slow down based on traffic in front of us is a treat. But then Autopilot takes it to another level by handling the steering for us too.
There’s no key for a Tesla. It’s paired to your phone so you just walk up, get in, and drive away. And when I walk up, it knows it is me and loads my profile which includes standard things like seat and mirror positions, but it also logs into my personal Spotify account, adjusts steering and throttle responsiveness the way I like it, applies my climate control preferences (including vent positions), and the list goes on and on.
The storage space is amazing! There’s a “frunk” in the front where we keep emergency supplies and stuff that isn’t accessed as often. The rear trunk has the space you’d normally expect from a small SUV but then you can lift up the floor and get lot more space. Elijah can fit down there with the lid closed!
The car has a permanent 4G cell connection. I’ve written before about how that allows me to collect a lot of live data through the API, but it also means nice features in the car. As you’d expect, the giant screen has live traffic in it, but it also streams music from Spotify or Slacker Radio. If you’re parked, you can watch Disney+, Netflix, YouTube, etc if you subscribe to those services. Some of those things require a $10/month Tesla fee to cover the extra bandwidth, but we were paying close to that much for Sirius XM in the last car and this is so much nicer that for now we’re going to pay it.
There are some things that feel different but aren’t pros or cons:
One pedal driving takes a while to get used to. When you lift off the accelerator, the car immediately starts to slow down through regenerative braking to recapture energy. If I let all the way off the accelerator, it slows down faster than I would normally decelerate, and it will come all the way to a stop. So that means on most trips, I never touch the brake. It was REALLY weird on the test drive and initially when we got the car. I wouldn’t say it’s second nature yet, but it’s getting there.
The entire roof is a window. Unfortunately, as a driver, I almost never notice this. It’s cool for Elijah though. One day we were driving to school, and I spotted a bald eagle flying at us. He couldn’t see it out the windshield, but he clearly saw it through the roof as we crossed paths.
And finally, there are some things in the “con” column:
A common complaint among Tesla owners is that Spotify locks up sometimes. I’ve experienced that too. The quick fix is to switch to another music option and then come back to Spotify and it works fine. It’s annoying when it happens.
I wish I could use the giant battery in my car to power my house or charge another car. Ford is making a big deal about how their F150 Lightning’s can do this and while it’s a feature that would hardly ever be used, I’d pay to have it just like I paid money to have a generator wired into my house.
Wiper controls are done via the screen so they aren’t as convenient as having them near the steering wheel. If you’re using cruise control or Autopilot, the wipers must be on Auto so the computer can make sure that the windshield cameras are clear. Most of the time that works ok, but sometimes it seems like the wipers go too fast. I prefer when they are going to slow because there is a “single wipe” button on the turn signal stalk.
There isn’t much visibility out the rear window. It’s enough, but it’s by far the least amount I’ve had on any vehicle I’ve owned.
Maybe I should have started the post with the cons so it ends in a happier state, but honestly, none of those “cons” were surprises to me. I found them all in my research before we ordered and none of them were showstoppers.
My overall review is “Two thumbs up. 5 stars. Would recommend.” I love this car! And as the gas prices continue to rise, it makes the price we paid even easier to stomach. When gas was $3.50/gallon, I calculated that we’d at least break even compared to buying another Escape. At $5.60/gallon that just makes it even more likely that this is going to save me money eventually, but I’ll keep you posted on that as we rack up some miles.
We held out for about two years but our whole family finally caught COVID. We suspect that Elijah caught it at school and then, since we weren’t willing to lock him in his room at home for a few days, Tyla and I caught it too. We’ve taken so many at-home COVID tests over the months since they came out that it was odd to finally see positive tests.
We’re in a weird situation now: COVID is still a leading cause of death in the United States, but it feels like we’ve lost track of it. Self-testing is great, but there doesn’t seem to be much emphasis on self-reporting a positive test. That makes it difficult to assess the risk level of going out. Hospitalization and death rates in our county have been increasing and that risk measure should be consistent, but what about all the other effects of COVID? How do I measure those risks if I don’t know how many people are currently infected?
There’s also a myth that getting COVID gives you super-immunity. Research shows that the vaccine gives you better immunity than catching COVID. Both wear off over time, and the combination of both is still the best, but this is an example of some basic information that we’re failing to spread in the community.
This won’t be the last time we catch it, but hopefully with our natural immunity, upcoming booster shots, masking in stores, and avoiding big crowds, we’ll be able to avoid it for quite a while. This isn’t something any of us are eager to go through again.
I was hoping to write this post after going on our first overnight road trip, but that got canceled because COVID. (More on that later.) I had done a lot of planning and calculation prep work so I think I can still share some info.
Charging time is something I almost never think about in daily life, but it comes to the forefront on road trips. If you’re the type of person who can burn off a tank of gas without stopping, there’s no getting around it: an EV will add time to your trip. Maybe cutting your fuel costs by ~90% still makes it worth it, but it’s definitely going to change your planning.
For our family, I don’t expect charging to impact our total trip time because we rarely go more than two hours without stopping for a bathroom break. Our trip to Oregon was 3 hours and 50 minutes so I had a planned stop at the 2 hour mark where we would charge for 15 minutes and use the bathroom. There was a supercharger less than 2 miles from our rental house so I would have charged for about 15 minutes there when we arrived too. I doubt the exact plan would have held up and I would have stopped at other chargers as needed. I could have made it all the way down there in one charge and arrived with 17% battery, but being our first road trip, I wanted to see how it worked to combine the inevitable bathroom breaks with supercharger stops. Also, note that charging would be cheaper on the way back because I can roll into my house with a low battery state and charge for quite a bit less money than doing it at a supercharger station.
The Tesla road trip planner is ok, but if you’re a big planner, you’ll find it lacking. I prefer to use A Better Route Planner when I look at road trips. You can specify which types of chargers your happy to use, the efficiency you typically get in your own car, the amount of charge you plan to leave with, how much charge you want to arrive with, what amenities you want to have at a charging stop, and much more. You can even give the site/app access to your Tesla’s data and have it update your plan on the fly.
So yes, road tripping with an EV is different and will probably slow you down depending on your personal situation. Maybe the gas savings will make it worth it for you, or maybe you’ll still prefer to take your gas vehicle on longer trips. We certainly aren’t getting rid of our truck anytime soon and I’m sure we’ll use it for some road trips in the future too, but I’m also looking forward to our next overnight trip so we can try all this planning out in the real world!
Some people build elaborate 3D printer enclosures to do things like control temperature during prints. I haven’t done anything that complicated yet, but I do like keeping dust and cat hair off the printer. So when it’s not in use, I have been setting a cardboard box over the top of it. It works, but it looks ugly.
The other problem I needed to solve is that filament is hydroscopic. If it sucks up too much moisture from the air, it can cause print problems. I’ve been storing the filament rolls in Ziploc bags with desiccant packs in them. Again, this works fine, but it looks messy and when I want to print, I have to pull the roll out of the bag and get it set into the rollers so it will feed into the printer, etc.
I set out to make an enclosure and dry box that would solve these problems. I’m not sure I’m there yet, but I’m at least at a stopping point for now.
For the enclosure, I decided to go with a minimalistic design. I just wanted to have sticks making a cube and then fill in the panels with either plywood or plexiglass. I modeled up corner brackets in Fusion360 and 3D printed them.
Acrylic seemed a bit expensive, and I thought I could save myself some money by purchasing cheap poster frames. That choice ended up making this a very frustrating project. The plastic frames technically did work but they were extremely thin and difficult to work with. They got scratched up and cracked during the project.
I further complicated the box by making it the wrong size the first time. I forgot how much the bed of the printer slides back and forth so I had to take it apart, cut some of my extra plastic, and try again.
The door was the last piece of the puzzle and by that point, I was tired of the project so I made a frame to hold a plastic sheet and then used rare earth magnets so that it would stick to the face of the enclosure but be easily removable.
Next up was the dry box for the filament. That part went much smoother because Becky Stern has an excellent Instructable article. I 3D printed my own nuts and bolts (with a hole down the middle for filament to feed through) and also printed hangers for the PVC pipe that the filament rolls sit on.
After what seemed like forever, I attached a battery powered LED light to the roof of the enclosure and called it good for now. Maybe this will last me for years, but I could also see getting frustrated with it and wanted to redo it. The basic design is ok but I do want to change the plastic panels, the way the door works, and give it a better paint job. I do really like that I can just leave the filament in the machine instead of unloading it and storing it away every time though.
Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday! The series kind of losing a bit of its luster when it’s the only set of posts happening on the blog right now, but let’s stick with it.
I’ve had a lot of fun reading data from the OBDII ports in our cars over the years, so you can imagine my excitement when I learned that Teslas have an API you can access to get tons of data. There are a variety of apps that can connect to the API and pull down data for you, but I chose TeslaMate specifically because it runs locally and I am in control of all my data. When you see how much data it collects, you can see why maybe it’s good to take a little extra precaution in who can access the data!
So just what do you get to see?
Drive and charging reports
Driving efficiency report
Consumption (net / gross)
Charge energy added vs energy used
Vampire drain
Projected 100% range (battery degradation)
Charging Stats
Drive Stats
History of installed updates
See when your car was online or asleep
Lifetime driving map
Visited addresses
You can check out the documentation link for a full set of screenshots but here are a couple:
Flipping through those dashboards should quickly give you the idea that there is a LOT of information being collected and it is collected multiple times per second! The data comes in live as the car is driving through the car’s built-in LTE connection and it is stored locally on my server in a database. If you want to see a demo the dashboards that sit on top of the data, check out the first ~14 minutes of this YouTube video.
Setup requires a bit of intermediate to advanced geekery. It runs in Docker containers, but there are some tutorials that walk through the config file manipulation and command line jobs to execute. It has been an interesting way to learn some additional technology. It’s my first time running my own Docker containers locally, my first time using Grafana, and my first time working with a PostreSQL database.
I set it up the first day we had it and I feel like I’m only beginning to scratch the surface of what it can do. For now I just like knowing that I’m collecting the data so that I can do more with it in the future.
Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday! I hope you’re ready for more of this because now that we have it in our garage, I have a few weeks of post ideas queued up.
This week let’s talk about the question “How long does it take to charge?” I get it. I asked the same question when I was researching. The questions is a bit flawed though. Driving a gas vehicle, we think in terms of stopping to fill up. When you’re driving an electric vehicle, it’s most economical to arrive at home empty, not full. It’s significantly cheaper to charge at home. The goal is to make sure that your home charging solution can supply enough juice to let you leave with a full battery in the morning.
When I was doing the math, I kept thinking about how long it would take to charge from 0% to 100%. My home charger adds about 14 miles of range per hour so it would take almost a day to go from 0 to 100%! Is that ok? It turns out that yes, this is fine, because in the entire life of your vehicle, you’ll almost certainly never do 0-100%. Running down to 0% is bad for the battery and charging to 100% isn’t great either (though it’s ok when you’re preparing for a long drive.) A much more likely scenario is that overnight you’ll simply be replacing the charge that you used during the day. We drive around 80 miles per day so in less than 6 hours, I’ve recovered my lost charge for the day. That leaves a LOT of leeway for longer trips on weekends, and even if I didn’t completely refill from an exceptionally low battery state, I’d have plenty for my normal day of commuting.
But charging speed DOES matter when on a road trip. If you’re traveling more than one charge form home, and if you’re not charging at your destination, then you’ll be supercharging. All Tesla superchargers are faster than home chargers by there are a variety of speeds ranging from 72 kW to 250 kW. My 220v 20amp circuit at home is good for 4 kW so these Superchargers are significantly faster. We did a test at a 150 kW charger and added 17% to our battery in 7 minutes. That supercharger was adding around 10 miles of range for every minute we charged and it wasn’t even the fastest charger version!
Further complicating the original questions is that batteries charge fastest at lower charge states and they get much slower as you approach 100%. So if you’re really trying to optimize your stops (like on an EV Canonball Run), you would keep your charges in roughly the 10-50% range. Here’s a chart showing how much juice you can shove into a Tesla battery at various states of charge:
So how long does it take to charge the battery? I don’t know, and most of the time, I don’t pay any attention to charging speed. If I’ve got enough juice to get through my day then I’m good to go and I know it will be full again the next morning. I’ll think about it more on a road trip, but even then, if I’m stopping for the bathroom or food, it’s going to be ready for the next leg of the trip before I am. Stay tuned for a future post about what it is like to plan and execute a road trip on battery power!
We ordered a Tesla Model Y on October 18, 2021. The original estimate was that we’d receive our car sometime in May 2022. 210 days later, almost exactly in the middle of the original estimate range, our car arrived! While we waited, the estimated delivery date changed many times. I kept track of all the changes and plotted it as the number of estimated days until our delivery window.
Less than a week before the delivery date, we got a call to talk about our trade in. Via a combination of text messaging and the phone app, we shared some basic information and photos of the car we wanted to trade in. They gave us a quote which seemed reasonable compared to other sites like Carvana and CarMax so we went with it. In Washington state, trade in value is deducted from the new car’s price before sales tax is collected so that’s a significant advantage.
The next day we got a text message asking us to choose a date for delivery! We picked the first available spot and then it was time to start filling out forms… online. Everything was done through the app! We got PDFs of all the sales documentation along with a full breakdown of exactly how much we owed. Once I texted back and forth a bit to understand some of their calculations, we completed the payment via the app. Payment is all done via the app whether you’re financing, paying cash, or getting a third-party loan.
We’ve ordered cars from other manufacturers in the past and when they were “delivered”, we had to go to the dealership and spend 2-3 hours going through paperwork and attempted upselling of paint protection film, interior sprays, extended warranty, service plans, and more. With Tesla, it was a true delivery experience. A driver arrived at our house within the two-hour scheduled window and dropped off the car. We did have to do some paperwork for the DOL, but then I signed a form on his phone and he transferred ownership to the app on my phone. (With a Tesla, your phone is your key.) The driver inspected our trade-in to make sure it matched the condition that we had shared earlier and then drove away. That’s it!
The entire process from ordering it online to getting daily updates on the estimated delivery window via the app to texting our sales advisor periodically with questions to the streamlined delivery approach was a joy! I can’t begin to compare it to some of the bad experiences we’ve had buying cars in the past.
Now it’s time to go through that semi-awkward period where we are the “new car people”. It’s a tradeoff between being super excited about this new purchase but also feeling a bit embarrassed about it. Even though I’ve done the math that shows it will pay out eventually compared to what we would have bought instead, that’s not totally true because we could have bought a much cheaper used car to get us from point A to point B.
A lot of the frequent questions I get about owning a Tesla are covered in my original “Why we bought a Tesla Model Y” post, but I’ll update one of them: “How much does it cost to charge it up?” That question is a little easier if I convert it to “What is the energy cost to drive 100 miles?” Our Escape consistently got 22.7 mpg and gas at the six closest stations around my house averages $4.89 today so the Escape would cost $21.54 in gas to drive 100 miles. For the Tesla, if I consider average kWh/mile and a small amount of energy loss to heat while charging, it would be $2.88 to drive that same 100 miles (87% less).
Will this really save us money overall? Only time will tell and even then, we’ll be guessing since we won’t be driving a comparable internal combustion car on all the same trips. It will probably come as no surprise that I have detailed data about the exact cost per mile for all our vehicles over the years (purchase price, trade in value, service costs, registration fees, fuel costs, inflation, etc.) so I’ll be able to make a good comparison. But in the meantime, I’m going to be happily driving around our new computer-on-wheels and thoroughly enjoying not wasting my time waiting in line at slow gas pumps or wondering what the oil drip on the garage floor means!
The audio-visual setup at our church is not very impressive. We don’t ask a lot of it. The main functions are:
Amplifying pastor’s voice
Providing a feed to the screen in the nursery area
Recording the service
Check out this “before” picture. Believe it or not, this is after I had started replacing some gear and throwing stuff away.
Yes that is a CRT TV and yes it was used every Sunday.
I’m the one who ends up running the equipment most of the time so I decided it was time to take this area on as a project. If you’ve been following my @martenswoodshop account then you’ve seen some progress updates in the stories, but over the last couple months I’ve been slowly building up the new solution piece by piece. I wasn’t confident enough to do it all at once since there are so many unique constraints to a project at church. Things rarely play out as expected. This was my rough plan going into it:
Along the way, I was happy to find someone at work who was selling three 24″ monitors and a monitor arm to hold them all. That was the perfect addition to the project because I’m always nervous about stuff toppling over the edge and landing on people. Here’s a look at the end result:
The screen on the left is the video switcher. It takes input from up to four cameras though we only use two today and it combines in the audio from our audio mixer. It records straight to USB (or in the future can live stream to YouTube.) The middle screen is a PC that I’ll use for uploading to YouTube, using extra features of the video switcher, and, in the future, controlling the TV in front of the church. The right screen is for our security cameras.
If I wanted to post a sermon with the old setup, I would come home with two SD cards from the video cameras and a DVD with audio from the mixer. I would have to edit that all together and then upload it to YouTube. That was a couple hours of work for me when I got home every Sunday. So you can imagine my joy when yesterday I recorded the whole service to a USB stick and uploaded it directly to YouTube before I left church!
I hesitate to post this because there are always more things that can be improved (cable management for one), but I do feel like this is in a place where I can slow down for a bit. Not only is this a nicer to use, it opens more possibilities down the road and hopefully it’s not so intimidating for others to learn.
We’re eagerly awaiting the delivery of our Model Y. We ordered in mid-October and our original delivery estimate was May 2022. I have the Tesla app installed on my phone and I check it at least once a day. It has changed many times (both forward and backward) but it was holding steady for May 8 – June 12. As we got closer and closer to May 8 our hopes were going up that it was going to happen. But this morning, the date range got pushed back to May 24 – June 20. (Tuesday seems to be a popular day for them to change the estimated delivery dates.) So the wait continues…
There is an online spreadsheet for eager Tesla owners where people record when they ordered and when it was delivered. As with most crowd-sourced data, it’s noisy and full of obvious errors, but looking at similar orders in my area, people who ordered around the same time as we did are starting to receive their cars. Hopefully we’re not too far behind!
While I wait, I continue to soak up Tesla content, and while this video didn’t teach me a lot that I hadn’t read elsewhere, I thought it was a good summary of what it’s like to own a Model Y for a couple years:
