AI does it again and saves me money, well over $1000 so let’s discuss what happened. The problem was over the years, we’ve added a ton of devices to our home network. In addition to cell phones, tablets, Apple TVs, Roku’s, security cameras, computers and wifi enabled appliances, the network was getting over worked.
Like any clueless person, I simply added more and more WiFi routers to spread the load and bandaged the bleeding of network bandwidth. I decided this year was the time to upgrade the whole network to something new and unified. I looked at various options and the cheapest was $600 for mesh wifi network which many people complained about as somewhat unstable.
I was going to go “high end” for my home by purchasing a bunch of UniFi stuff from UI.com but I decided to take a full inventory of my equipment and ask ChatGPT what I could do with it. After confirming a few things, it suggested I turn all my routers into Access Points and walked me through configuring each setting router by router. I had a total of three routers and a firewall at my home.
I’m not going to sugar coat it, this was a long painful process of changing stuff I had no clue such as transmit power, roaming assistant dBm, AMPDU RTS, TX bursting, etc. on three different routers for two different broadcast frequencies (2 ghz and 5 ghz). Sometimes I would change something and it would break or not work and other times it didn’t do what it was supposed to do. Honestly, I think I made a few mistakes in some of the settings but ChatGPT was patient and asked me to post screen shots of stuff and corrected me when I was wrong (sample image below).
After one full hour of changes, trial and error, and maximizing the settings, and running commands to “test” the radio frequencies and broadcasts, we got it done and rebooted all the equipment. When it came up, I had one unified network all over my house running at blazing speeds! I was blown away. I’m not sure how much it would have cost to have a network pro come out and troubleshoot and fix all of this stuff but not having to resort to that nor buy all new equipment have save me over $1000. Oh and I asked it to document all the stuff we did so I know how to do this again if I need it.
I had tried to “fix” this before but if you google “best setting for WiFi routers” you’ll get a list of endless opinions and junk. Why this works is because I gave ChatGPT my inventory, my environment, my settings and it fixed it all for me, a google search would never be able to do that so it would never work unless you spend hours and hours learning what all these settings do, who has time for that?
Building A Home Lab
Since I didn’t have to spend the money upgrading the network and I am now building so many apps that I decided to build a dedicated “server” setup, I asked ChatGPT for some options. It asked me a few questions about what kind of apps I plan on building and then gave me a list of recommended hardware for processor, ram, storage.
I got on amazon and started looking at computers but I really didn’t want to go through the configuration matching of ram, processor, storage , etc for each one so I took screen shots of the list of computers on Amazon and asked Chat to pick the one with the best power/value balance that met my budget and voila!
I ordered the recommended PC and it should arrive this weekend. Chat said we can walk through the whole home server lab setup step by step when I get the equipment in. It has already recommended an operating system (which I have already downloaded) and other software we’ll need to get going.
I plan on building my own “cloud” setup with all my apps: Travel Planning, Financial Portfolio, Utilities Dashboard, Options Trading, etc. I’m so excited!
If you are in a similar situation here is what I suggest:
- Gather an inventory of all your new and old routers including model numbers.
- Copy and paste it into ChatGPT
- Ask it what it can do with that equipment
It may or may not work for you. If you have very old equipment or cheap routers it may not work but it will only take a few minutes to try.
Share The Wealth
The order and magnitude of growing efficiency with AI is totally amazing and totally terrifying so what are your thoughts?