Ian Carmenates

To get 17 Stern pinball machines online, I set up a second router as an access point only. DHCP is off, the 75 ft cable from the Nighthawk goes into one of its LAN ports. The white router just broadcasts Wi-Fi. The Nighthawk still hands out every IP address on the floor.

The machines then wouldn't connect. They'd join the network, drop packets, and fail to get an address. Stern's Wi-Fi drivers in these machines are older Linux ones, and they don't handle stricter wireless security settings. Once I matched the router's settings to what the machines support, they got addresses and reached Stern's servers right away.

I used the Mac's Terminal for two things. With DHCP off on the white router, I set a manual IP on my Mac so I could reach the router's admin page. After the change, I switched the Mac back to automatic and checked the address it received, which confirmed my Mac was getting a valid address from the Nighthawk across the 75 ft cable.

networksetup -setmanual "Wi-Fi" <static-ip> <subnet-mask> <router-ip>
networksetup -setdhcp "Wi-Fi"
ipconfig getifaddr en0

To roll it out, I set up the first machine by hand on the Retro_Pinball network. Stern's menu generates a QR code for that network, so I scanned it with the QR scanner on each of the other 16 cabinets. All 17 are online.

Road America was the last race weekend of the USF Juniors season, and the team won the championship. Here's what I worked on, start to finish.

Wednesday was setup. We leveled the scale pads, set corner weights, ride heights, and static alignment for this track, and the car cleared official technical inspection.

Thursday was three sessions: Test 1 at 9:00, Test 2 at 11:30, and official practice at 3:45. The point was to compare data the team logged here earlier in the season against that week's conditions. I logged tire pressure growth, pyrometer spreads across all four tires, and fuel use, which gets used to work out burn rates per lap and minimum weight margins. After practice I re-checked camber and toe.

Friday in qualifying, an ignition switch fault in the switch panel cut power and cost us 15 minutes. We diagnosed it and swapped the switch inside that window. Then came three races across Friday and Saturday, and we closed out the season as 2026 USF Juniors champions.

I recorded most of the weekend on my Meta glasses. Here's a short video of it.

Just hit 1,000 miles on my new Tacoma, which means break-in period is done. Instead of waiting for the factory 10K interval, I pulled the oil myself to see what was actually in it.

A materials engineering class is what made break-in click for me. It's not a myth, it's tolerances. New internal surfaces wear each other down under load until they settle into clearance, shedding metal into the oil in the process. That's exactly why the first oil change matters, especially on a forced induction engine where the margin for error is smaller.

That same class is why I care about oil analysis too, not just oil changes. A used oil analysis measures exact wear metal content, contamination, and remaining additive life in the oil, the same wear and degradation concepts from class, just applied to something in my driveway instead of a lab sample.

Small maintenance job, good reminder of why I picked this major.