Wardriving is the practice of driving around a vehicle/bike or drone to discover Wi-Fi networks, mapping their locations, and sometimes logging their details, such as SSID (network name), security protocols, and signal strength. This activity, often performed by hobbyists, cybersecurity researchers, and hackers. It involves using a laptop, smartphone, or a specialized device equipped with Wi-Fi scanning software. (RPi4 etc…) While wardriving itself is not illegal, it raises privacy and security concerns as it can potentially be used to exploit unsecured networks or to gather data for malicious ..read more

Concept The electric car build has stalled, thus I thought I would post an update on my latest lithium battery build. This one was dreamt out of necessity. After doing a large amount of renovations on an investment property and not having power to charge batteries and run tools I decided to build myself a battery. The 2 key factors for this build were: Portability – It needed to go in and out of my Ute with ease, and Modular – I need to be able add components that I need as I go without hassle. I decided pretty early that I was going to use the Milwaukee Packout cases. Yes they are a bit expe ..read more

I’ll keep this super short and sweet. Keep an eye on this post for updates on antennas as we test them. I’ll do my best to provide a short explanation of the tests, and then a pic of the results. Hope it helps. What is SWR? Straight from the wiki: In radio engineering and telecommunications, standing wave ratio (SWR) is a measure of impedance matching of loads to the characteristic impedance of a transmission line or waveguide. Impedance mismatches result in standing waves along the transmission line, and SWR is de ..read more

V2.0.0 Alpha GUI! Ever needed to compress an image down to a reasonable size for use on a web server? or to send over a slow link? We have tried multiple image compression apps and this one easily takes the top prize. Matteo @ SaeraSoft has been working hard on this application in his spare time and I believe is onto something good here. I’ll try sum up the features quickly for you here: Batch Compress – compress multiple files and folders easily Set Quality levels – You determine the compression you want. Preview Images – Self explanatory Online App – If you don’t want to use the app, you ..read more

Only 1 things has slowed down the progress of the electric vehicle build, and that was the arrival of the Onefinity CNC router. However, for the most part its done and we can move on. Check out the build below. What is the Onefinity CNC? The Onefinity (1F) is a different take on a Desktop CNC from the guys here. They market this particular machine as “reinventing the CNC experience” and for good reason. The biggest difference between this machine and others is the fact that they use hardened steel cylindrical shafts on all axis with ball screws to provide the motion. No belts, no wheels, just ..read more

It’s been a long while since an update. My Apologies. I had to move workshop blah blah blah…excuses really. Last post I promised an adapter plate and batteries. Well, I can say early that I have produced 50% of the goods. The Batteries are in, and the adapter plate is still pending! Batteries Thanks to my good mate Leon at Lithium Power we were able to source 6 x Tesla 24v modules. At this stage the plan is to only use 5 modules, leaving 1 as a spare. Leon also chucked in a few adapter boards he designed for easy integration to the BMS. I’m pretty sure I’ll be going with the ZEVA BMS, however ..read more

Would you believe that this whole exercise started after building my home power wall? It seemed like the next logical step in the process. Harvest the sun’s energy, store it in my DIY power wall, then charge an Electric vehicle with said stored energy. Makes sense yea? Well, the power wall has been operational now for over a year and I have only made a little bit of headway into the DIY electric vehicle (EV) game. Donor Vehicle So many choices! But the vehicle had to meet a few criteria. The first being the ‘weight’ of the vehicle. No point choosing a super-heavy vehicle and trying to push tha ..read more

I’m working on a project that houses a bunch of Raspberry Pi computers in multiple remote locations. I wanted to be able to monitor the “Health” of the hardware in these remote locations. The metrics I was hoping to capture are Up-time, CPU temps, CPU usage, Memory and disk usage, etc.. as you may have noticed, I also have a love/hate relationship with Grafana, which made it the only choice for displaying these metrics in a user-friendly way. Prerequisites: 1 x VM running Ubuntu 20.04 – I tested using a Cloud Compute server on VULTR, but you could use any VM that is on the same network as the ..read more

The ultimate goal is to be able to monitor my power-wall in the Home Assistant (HA) dashboard. In my case, HA runs on a 10″ android tablet out in the Kitchen. Firstly, I need to throw some recognition to a couple of people. The first being @Wolf. Absolute legend helped me out with some Node-red issues, and basically, without him, the 2-3 days development time would have turned into weeks. A Full list of recognition is at the bottom of the past! Enjoy! Oh and yes I could have done this whole install on Docker/Portainer and I most likely will go down that route, but for now, this is the down-and ..read more

I generally only post offline software tools that have helped me in the past, however, I can’t really go past this online cloud service. Now I know what your thinking, there are heaps of these services! and yes, there are. However, I wanted to highlight VULTR because of the access to servers in Sydney Australia and the ease of use. The location of servers was important for me as I didn’t really want my VPN service routing around the globe. So for me, server locations are a BIG deal. Sure, if Digital Ocean had servers in Perth or Sydney then I’d probably be reviewing them also. Ok, so what do I ..read more