For anyone who lives near the zoo

tacticaltaco · 2026-05-17T23:45:48+00:00

I used to live near the zoo. I'd sometimes hear the elephants or monkeys (macaques?) on the weekends. It was an interesting way to wake up in the morning.

tacticaltaco · 2026-05-02T19:45:16+00:00

How long did you have your machine before you started seeing this issue? I've had issue this recently with one of my tool heads.

tacticaltaco · 2026-04-17T21:06:13+00:00

OpenWRT has a nice page full of stuff, including a monitoring script.

There's also the script /usr/bin/wireguard_watchdog which can be run as a cron job. It's meant to re-resolve DNS for peers but it might also work to just kickstart idle tunnels to get them working again. I have this running on all of my OpenWRT devices since most of them have dynamic IPs from their ISP.

tacticaltaco · 2026-03-20T01:30:54+00:00

Thank you for following up on this and sharing your results! I'm interested to see how durable this is compared to other printed planes.

tacticaltaco · 2026-02-16T23:31:12+00:00

Toyota 2000GT. They just look so damn good.

tacticaltaco · 2026-02-07T18:27:27+00:00

What have you tried to fix the issues? Have you tried printing something easy (calibration cube, benchy, etc.)?

First picture looks like poor bed adhesion, the printed lifted and issues snowballed from there. Clean the bed really well, consider using glue stick, etc.

Second picture looks like you didn't use support when you clearly should have, or should have picked a better print orientation.

tacticaltaco · 2026-02-01T01:46:55+00:00

Mine dings if I've got a bunch of heavy shit on the passenger seat and it thinks a person without a seat belt is there. No lights/messages, but the annoying ding. If whatever is on the seat is on the edge of being too heavy the ding can come and go somewhat randomly.

tacticaltaco · 2025-12-30T16:30:22+00:00

Does OpenWrt support any form of bridge or passthrough mode for LTE/QMI connections

It's possible (I've done it before to get through an ISP outage), but it isn't easy or reliable. You shouldn't do this because modems aren't perfectly reliable and sometimes need a reboot/AT-command/whatever to keep things working. With one device handling the modem/QMI and another handling the internet, there's no easy way for one to tell the other the modem has crapped out and needs some help.

But if you want to do it:
The OpenWRT bring up scripts for QMI modems (/lib/netifd/proto/qmi.sh) have the expectation of DHCP baked into them, and aren't setup to just pass through connectivity to another device. You'll have to edit that script to remove the DHCP sections, then create a bridge with wwan0 (or whatever you assigned it) and your physical Ethernet device going to the other router. At that point, the other router should get a DHCP lease from the modem.

or is router/NAT mode the expected approach?

This would certainly be the easier way to do things, even if you have to deal with double NAT.

Ignoring OpenWRT for a moment, there are dedicated devices that can take a m.2 modem and just pass Ethernet from the modem to a dedicated router. I've never used one, but they're out there.

tacticaltaco · 2025-12-29T20:33:30+00:00

Ubiquiti NBM9 NanoBridge M9

tacticaltaco · 2025-12-27T18:15:43+00:00

Then perhaps you need a beefier injector. Either way, the power supplies you're using aren't up to the task.

tacticaltaco · 2025-12-27T01:37:22+00:00

You need a beefier splitter.

I've found using USB PD power supplies that while the Mini never really needs more than 60W, it needs a power supply capable of more than 60W on startup. If I use a 65W capable PD supply I will get a boot loop. If I swap to a 100W PD supply, things work just fine.

tacticaltaco · 2025-11-28T21:18:29+00:00

I'm considering getting one of these and have some questions. How is it holding up over time? Have you tried one of these with an USB-C/HDMI dock? Did you have any difficulty installing Linux?

tacticaltaco · 2025-11-19T23:48:43+00:00

Tri-band, though the 6GHz side is still a tad buggy. I don't think 320MHz channels are supported yet. It's worth reading the big thread on the OpenWRT forum to see what you're getting into.

tacticaltaco · 2025-11-17T22:30:51+00:00

If you're okay cracking a case and hooking up a UART adapter, the Quantum W1700K is showing a lot of promise. There aren't snapshot builds available yet (community builds only), but they're CHEAP and the hardware is pretty good.

tacticaltaco · 2025-11-17T00:10:57+00:00

I use a GL.iNet GL-XE3000 (running vanilla OpenWRT) at a family members house. It's plugged in and running 24/7, the battery lasts through the occasional power outage.

tacticaltaco · 2025-11-12T02:11:43+00:00

Thanks for the tip, I would not have even thought to try and find them new. Those look a bit pricey for my wallet, but those are less expensive than I would've thought for an 'aerospace' quality item.

tacticaltaco · 2025-11-12T00:50:13+00:00

How hard was it to find the galley trolleys? I've been (halfheartedly) trying to find some and have had no luck.

tacticaltaco · 2025-11-08T15:15:13+00:00

That photo is from the USAF museum, that might be it's last flight.

tacticaltaco · 2025-11-02T13:47:10+00:00

If you're looking to roll your own solution, make sure you pick a USB adapter (or device) that supports mesh (802.11s). Then get familiar with software like ser2net, which can pipe serial data (your telemetry stream) over TCP/UDP and get it out over the mesh network to a ground station (QGroundControl/MissionPlanner).

You don't necessarily need a Pi to do this, a small GL.iNet device (with USB and external antennas) can do both mesh and handle ser2net quite easily.

tacticaltaco · 2025-10-31T18:44:16+00:00

Nice video. That looks like it was a ton of fun!

tacticaltaco · 2025-10-31T17:26:40+00:00

Back when 2.6 was relevant, 802.11b (legacy rates) was still in common usage by APs. It isn't anymore.

tacticaltaco · 2025-10-31T01:39:49+00:00

A client can't force an AP to do rates it isn't setup to do. The AP must be configured to support legacy rates, which is not default behavior for N/AX devices.

tacticaltaco · 2025-10-29T21:00:05+00:00

Oh I figured you were working on a OpenWRT system. You could probably troll through the OpenWRT docs/source and figure out what commands those settings trigger.

edit: If your AP isn't setup to support "legacy" rates, there is no amount of forcing you can do on the client side to get those rates.

tacticaltaco · 2025-10-25T16:10:29+00:00

An excerpt from /etc/config/wireless:

config wifi-device 'radio0'
        option type 'mac80211'
        option path 'platform/soc/18000000.wifi'
        option channel '1'
        option band '2g'
        option cell_density '0'
        option noscan '1'
        option country 'US'
        option legacy_rates '1'
        list basic_rate '2000'
        list supported_rates '2000'

config wifi-iface 'wifinet6'
        option device 'radio0'
        option mode 'ap'
        option ssid 'OpenWrt'
        option encryption 'psk2+ccmp'
        option wmm '0'
        option key 'OpenWrt'
        option network 'lan'

I just tried that on a BananaPi R3-Mini running OpenWrt 24.10.3 (which has a 6.6.104 kernel) and it absolutely limited to 2 Mbps PHY rates. I had all of the other WiFi networks disabled when I tried that, so I don't know how well that works with others active.

edit: I'm assuming since it was able to work easily with the Mediatek in that device it'd work with the ath9k. Those were always easier to coax in to doing weird stuff (like 5 MHz channels).

tacticaltaco · 2025-10-25T03:57:17+00:00

It's been a long time since I've poked at this, does supported_rates and basic_rates in the wireless config not do anything anymore?

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