Road Trippin’ with a Tesla

I purchased a 2018 Model 3 LR RWD back in June 2018 and have absolutely enjoyed owning an electric car. I appreciate the very minimal maintenance and being able to just charge it up when I need to at home without planning on visiting a gas station ever again. I’ve also enjoyed road tripping with the Tesla as supercharging is very accessible, quick, and easily let’s you take some time from the road to stretch and explore new places. I just completed a nearly 1400 mile road trip through Vegas, Zion National Park, and the Grand Canyon and again it was quite a thrill to explore new places. I drove over 3700 miles last year through Yosemite, Yellowstone, Denver, and Roswell.

The vast majority of what makes a road trip with a Tesla enjoyable is that its a very great car to drive. Its quiet, has quite a lot of pep for passing, and autopilot (adaptive cruise control and lanekeeping) is absolutely the most amazing thing in the world. If you have the opportunity to consider getting a Tesla, take a test drive, you won’t regret it. Don’t worry about range anxiety, this car can handle it. Using the nav you’ll get updates if you need to slow down or need to charge to reach your destination. If you’re road tripping and can stay at a destination charger — do it, waking up with a full charge is amazing. Great job Tesla!

FYI: I own shares in Tesla.

Fun with Sensors

I started woodworking some more in the garage, since I plan on doing this for decades to come I should worry a bit about air quality. I found a cheap sensor on eBay that can read particles the size of 1.0 μm, 2.5μm, and 10μm and provide both the AQI for that as well as a particle count. I bought a similar all in one device on Amazon which is nice for a visual I can move around the shop and another bare device I wired into the Raspberry Pi. The result of using my table and miter saw are below. The base-line is because I run a box fan and air filter setup to try and keep the air somewhat clean.

Miter peak at AQI 50 @ 10μm and tablesaw peak of 139 AQI @ μm as graphed with grafana.

As shown the air quality is pretty bad when using these tools. Which means I will be wearing a N95 mask while using them to be on the safe side. But it looks like setting up the cuts I need to probably be less worried due to my box fan air cleaners. Next up is collecting more data around cleaning up (I use a leaf blower to kick up stray dust for my box fans to catch) and sanding. The result will hopefully be a nice coffee table. The progress of which after this weekend is about ready for finishing:

Coffee table progress.

Sensor is the Plantower PMS5003 (spec sheet) (amazon affiliate link) — This one includes a handy breakout board so you don’t need to solder from Adafruit and some code: Link here.

One with a screen I found on Amazon, there are cheaper ones available (Mine was about 50 bucks I think at the time): (amazon affilate link)