 Welcome friends to Pimp My Wifi. Is that how Pimp's talking? I actually don't know, but all I know is Pimp My Wifi 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when we were working on that homemade CPU water block that let me cheat in Scrapyard Wars season two is how horribly out of date some of your gear was.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'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 Ubiquiti Networks, the makers of the access point I ended up buying in SimLim Square in Pimp My Wifi episode one, 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 help us with anything that might involve power tools. So let's get crack-a-lackin'. 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 UniFi 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 gotta go. 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'll 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 the old absolutely no way. Okay, so that'll probably do the upstairs, right? It should. Okay. 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 got one, two, three walls between it and the den. However, we wanna 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 gonna have Ubiquiti's Edge Router Lite. 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 gotta 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 kind of a wall here. Like not kind of a wall, 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, I think I see what's going on here. So it looks like only two are connected. There's two of the wire pairs on the beige cables? Yeah. Okay, so that would explain it because you need four pairs for voice and data. Okay, cool. So all we gotta do is- It's right before lines. Connect them then, right? There we go. Ooh, okay. So that's how that goes over to that corner. One of them is actually in this guy. So one of them has, let me have a look. Yeah, that's it. Hold on. This one coming in here. So that one looks like it has three wires connected. Oops. 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. It might work, but- That's apparently what was done in the first place. I do see that. I can't give you how reliable that would be for data if it did work. Well, it stopped working. So about that reliable. Yes. We can certainly try it and see what happens. We can try it and see if it works immediately now. 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 start twisting wires together or? Sure, 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. Oh no, but there won't be any easy way to get it down the wall and out. Yeah, not really. It's not society anyway, it's not wife approved. Yeah. So that's why we didn't want the networking closet upstairs. Some thought was given to this, just not quite enough. The line is tech tips away. Red to red, green to green. Good so far. Oh, it looks like the black came off. Okay, so this is an improvement over before. It's flashing faster now. It's a line for sync. Do we want solid? Hey. We've got a line. Okay. It worked. All right, my ghetto pimp style, just twist them together. I mean, we'll fix it, but 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 gonna be building is a two by four construction shroud that's gonna allow for all the existing functionality. So easy access to things like these 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 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 gonna 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, cause 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, quieter. There's no fans, so they're less likely to collect dust. 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 VE247s 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. We'll try Visions, but honestly, I don't have a lot of hope for this. Well, then I will take them. Thank you, good sir. 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. 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? Sure thing, let's get to it. All right, let's do it. Do one, but then. Oh, no, no, no. This is too steady. Oh, gosh. That's okay. 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. 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. Oh, I see, okay, all right. Makes sense, makes sense. Okay, so we're just basically. 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. I can't reach it anymore, pretty much. Excellent, good, good. Slow and easy, boys. Now grab me another two by four. Grab me another two by four. Slide it to the back there and we're gonna slide it off on the two by four. Okay. Beautiful. On the edges here. Yeah, okay. Ready up back there? All right. Yeah, could we have, it might make our lives a little bit easier if once we've got it up, this slides away. Somebody pull on it. John, oh, awesome, thank you. Okay, guys. Pull it out, pull it out. Pull it out, pull it out. Go ahead. Let it down, straight down. There you go. Oh, we did it, guys. Now we wanna center it. Yep. Your way. Yeah, we just right there. Take the two by fours out and we're good. Cut this guy right in half so. Okay. Yep. And then we'll lift this side and do the same. Because when this sucker is spinning, it vibrates quite a bit. I like it. 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, brand new laptop. It's a UX303 from ASUS, as well as, ah, yes, from our friends over at Seagate and Synology. We've got a new NAS that is gonna 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, yeah, it looks like it kinda clips in somehow and then just slides on. So George and his guys have made about three metric butt 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 the 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 poolside. 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. 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 gonna go ahead and manage that and make sure that all of our APs are showing up. 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 five gigahertz and do a scan. It takes about five 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 p.m. 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 is 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, what's that? Sorry, I was saying close the lid. Okay. 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 Wifi. 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, bitches, is that how they walk?