Month: May 2023

Short Road Trip to University of Waterloo

This morning we wanted to show our son what the University of Waterloo campus looked like. This is also an excellent opportunity to get use to our new Tesla Model Y along with its Autopilot functionality.

As the above pictures show, the campus is a ghost town, but it was nice that most of the buildings were still opened and we took the opportunity to walk around.

Aside from the typical Toronto traffic, the drive itself was pretty uneventful. While on Highway 401, I had the car on both Auto Steer and Traffic Aware Cruise Control (TACC) for more than 80% of the trip. For the most part it worked well, but I did notice a few points:

Passing trucks seem to be a lot closer than I like when I manually pass a semi on the highway;
When in Auto Steer, the car seem to initiate the turn a little later than what I would normally do; and
Finally, one can get really use to TACC and forget to press the brake when TACC is off;
I love TACC when in traffic – it is a godsend!

We also took the opportunity to do a quick test supercharge in Cambridge, Ontario at 22 Pinebush Rd, Cambridge, ON N1R 8K5.

We really did not have to charge, since our Long Range model had enough juice to go there and back. We just wanted to experience what supercharging is like. It was super simple! We added 10kWh for $3.93, and that took about 6 minutes. During this time, I showed my wife how to do it.

Another experiment that we did was I ran Waze on my iPhone in concurrent with Tesla’s navigation routing and mapping. Albeit I currently have a sample size of one, but my feeling is that Waze is still better at this point in terms of traffic awareness and routing abilities. Also Tesla maps do not show obstructions, speed traps, and other goodness of Waze. I will be doing more of this comparison on our trip to Montreal next Friday.

Tesla Delivery Day

Today is the day! We departed our house at 10:45 am and arrived at 2 Chrislea Road, Vaughan, Ontario at 11:20am to pick up our new Model Y 2023. I drove into the service centre that was literally filled with Tesla vehicles to the point where we could not park at the service centre. We had to park at the next lot and walked over.

Location of the Tesla Vaughan Service Centre

It was not too bad, as if “someone up there” has arranged to put the rain on pause, while we walked into South entrance.

At the greeting counter, I was handed some paper work and told to sign at the relevant locations, which I did. The reception was a well oiled process. After the paperwork was handed over along with my bank draft at the second counter, I was handed the “card keys”, ownership paper, and my chaperone took me to the car. They didn’t even check if I had proper insurance!

He helped me to pair my iPhone 14 Pro to the car. Gave me a few tips on operating the wipers, and asked me if I had any questions, which I said “no.” I got into the car and adjusted my seats and mirrors, and we were on our way! I am certain, if I had any questions, he would have been of great help. However, I followed Tesla’s advice and watched all the delivery day videos, so I knew what I had to do. He did tell me that today at this centre, they are going to move over a hundred vehicles. This is more vehicles than any other dealerships in a single month. GM better up their game plan!

I dropped my wife off to her Toyota Prius Prime, and then routed the car to drop my neighbour off to pick up his 10 years old Tesla Model S that was being worked on. My neighbour being a Tesla champion and expert came along with us and was of great guidance to us through the delivery process. Thank you Johnny!

My beautiful wife in front of the Service Centre

On the way home, I established the data link (Premium Connectivity) and turned on Auto Steer. I had to drive a little ways for the car to calibrate itself before I can turn on the cruise control and auto steer. This feature was super handy when I got stuck at a traffic jam on the way home. My new Tesla was able to follow the car in front of me while I was bumper to bumper in the jam.

Once I got home, I tested the Mobile Charger to make sure that it was working and stuck the charger in the trunk, which is where it will live and use during road trips. I added my wife as a second driver, and we added profiles for myself and my wife, and went out for a late lunch. It was very weird to go out without any keys. I can now use my iPhone for both car and home locks.

Now we have two green vehicles in our garage.

Tesla Model Y 2023 (left), and Toyota Prius Prime 2020 (right)

Sorry Subaru Impreza 2013, you will now have to park in the drive way for now.

I have scheduled the charger to kick in at 5am tomorrow so that we can take a small road trip to the University of Waterloo tomorrow. We wanted to show my second son the campus as he considers his options for September.

Tesla charging through the Wall Connector at 40A (~9kW)

One last thing, I also configured the car with my home’s WiFi, and thought it was pretty cute to have the car showing my solar power generation status using my custom power dashboard.

Tesla displaying my solar power generation stats using the in car’s browser

Tomorrow to Waterloo, Ontario, and next week we’ll be going to Montreal! Going to look forward to our Supercharging experience.

New 1.5Gbps Internet Service

On April, 4th, I received a promotional offer from Rogers offering Ignite Internet service at 1.5Gbps plus Streaming for $114.99 per month.

I procrastinated a bit because I wanted to make sure that I can actually make use of this service. However, when I checked my bill for April, I noticed that my total monthly charges is at $102.99.

Note the above price prior to discount is at $117.99. I was curious to see if Rogers can get me a good deal without the Streaming service. I called Rogers support line and received a person who was not very helpful and simply just quoted conditions and deals to me. AI will do a number of these types of people soon.

I decided to try an alternative route by using Twitter (@RogersHelp). I direct messaged Rogers on Twitter and received wonderful help. They offered me the 1.5Gbps service at only $104.99 (with a 24 months commitment). This will be somewhat on par with my current payment and I will get 50% more throughput.

There is another question. Will my networking equipment make use of the 1.5Gbps? My networking setup has the Rogers Ignite WiFi Gateway (ARRIS Group, XB7 Modem) and is connected with a Cat5e cable to my Unifi Dream Machine Pro, using one of its 1Gbps RJ45 port.

How can we overcome the 1Gbps limit on the UDM Pro’s RJ45 port? Luckily the UDM Pro has an 10G SFP+ port as well. I went to Amazon and purchased a 10G SFP+ RJ45 Copper Module Transceiver.

The above will auto negotiate a 2.5Gbps to 10Gbps connection from the XB7 to my UDM Pro. Of course I will not be getting 2.5G or 10G speeds. These are just the physical maximum per the respective devices. Rogers will throttle my inbound and outbound traffic to 1.5Gbps and 50Mbps respectively.

After installing the SFP+ module and rewire the existing Cat5e cable, I had to reboot the both the XB7 modem and the UDM Pro. Once everything came back up, I had another problem. How do I test that I actually get 1.5Gbps? I cannot do it from any WiFi devices or any wired devices in my house because they are all limited to the 1Gbps port speed from my networking switches. Once again, Unifi had thought of this already and provide a speed test functionality on its management dashboard.

The tested speed seems to be better than expected.

So you can see from the above screen shot, that we are now getting what we are paying for. I also performed a double test from two different machines that are routed to a switch that has a 10Gbps connection to my UDM Pro, and each machine received a 700Mbps to 800Mbps download speed, which is around 1.5Gbps in aggregate. Mission accomplished.

Unifi just came out with a new firmware update that enable the UDM Pro to perform load balancing of more than one WAN connection. When the SkyLink service becomes more economically feasible, we can attach a satellite based internet service as a compliment to the existing Rogers service. This way during a power outage, we can continue to get Internet.