DIY Starlink Flat Mount RV Roof Adaptor Powered by 12 Volts

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Starlink folks can learn so neat efficiency tips from this guy! Nice video.

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/Jbikecommuter 📅︎︎ Dec 20 2022 🗫︎ replies

..... this video is 100% gold, he did his homework and nothing is left to guesswork, even pin-out on the RJ45's are noted to make sure you don't screw up. Very professional. You may not have the coin for the expensive router nor want/be able to use a 3D printer but the clear guidelines will allow for a painless conversion with little risk of breaking your new toy.

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/MortimersSnerd 📅︎︎ Dec 20 2022 🗫︎ replies

Very detailed...

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/BrainWaveCC 📅︎︎ Dec 20 2022 🗫︎ replies

DAMN...thanks for sharing this video and your tried and tested work. It blows my mind that engineers at Starlink, didn't friggin consider all the flaws / nuances that you pointed out in your video.

That Starlin router is shite. I mean no ethernet ports, what da ferk? Also, the having to go 'over wi-fi twice' issue is a big one.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/colocasi4 📅︎︎ Dec 20 2022 🗫︎ replies

That's awesome. Great video and mod!

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/lelandbay 📅︎︎ Dec 21 2022 🗫︎ replies

jason is very creative person.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/osokthedevil 📅︎︎ Dec 21 2022 🗫︎ replies

pretty much anything you can 3D print with won't be as robust in the exterior conditions that marine grade starboard would

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/bikingwithpanda 📅︎︎ Dec 20 2022 🗫︎ replies
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Welcome back, everybody. In this video, I cut the leg off of our Starlink Dishy McSquareface and flat-mount it on our roof using this 3D-printed wedge mount adapter that I designed in SolidWorks. If you enjoy these handwritten subtitles and translations, Please let me know that it's worthwhile in the comments. And you're probably asking yourself, why would this handsome Sasquatch cut the leg off a perfectly good Starlink? And that's a great question. And because I know this video's likely going to attract a lot of viewers that may not know who we are and what we're doing, allow me two minutes to give you the backstory. In 2014, we started building our own off-road expedition truck from scratch in our home garage. It was built to be rugged, robust, and to get us off the beaten path much past the end of the road where a typical RV would get stopped. And it's done that very well taking us to the Arctic Ocean of Northern Canada down through the states, Baja, Mexico, and all throughout Central America. And then this past June, we shipped our rig to South America, and we've driven it all throughout Colombia and now into Ecuador. And back when we were still building our rig, Starlink was just announced and I thought, It would be awesome to have satellite internet on the go, but it's going to be too expensive and it's probably not going to happen before we get our truck done. And so, for the first four years of our journey, we relied pretty heavily on our MoFi LTE router, buying sim cards in every country we went to, and using our long-range directional antennas. First, we used the MoFi 4500, and then more recently we upgraded to the MoFi 5500. You can see the video up here. But more and more we're seeing that our cellular connection, even though it has full bars, has really pathetic data rates. There's no lead in the pencil, as they say. The cellular towers in these areas are probably saturated or they've got an old US Robotics modem sitting in the booth at the bottom. But one day I was looking at the Starlink website coverage map and a little pocket of coverage popped up in Colombia. And even though I knew it was a little bit expensive in the United States at about $135 a month, and knowing full well that it would be out of the budget for us, I jokingly added it to the cart. And lo and behold, it was 210,000 Colombian pesos for a month of RV service, which works out to $44 a month. It turns out they have a deeply discounted rate for developing markets. So we ordered it. It shipped from Hawthorne, California on Friday, and it arrived in Bogota, Colombia Monday morning. Look how happy that Sasquatch is!! And we've been using it all throughout Colombia with really good speeds. And even though we're outside of the officially covered area, we're still getting 250 megabits per second. Now that we've moved into Ecuador, it's not even offered here yet, but we're still getting really good speed. And for what it does, the hardware is amazingly small and compact, but it still has a few drawbacks for the way we travel. You know, it's not so small. This is the box that comes in and I imagine for RVers who have a 5th wheel trailer and they want to take it out to the lake for the week or two weeks or they're going to a state park or something set up is not so bad, just pull it out of the box, clip in the tripod, put it somewhere, it's got a clear shot of the sky, and then hook up the router on the inside. But I've done this over a hundred times already and it's getting a little bit annoying. Further, you can see the dish is getting a little bit banged up, marred up a little bit, bit of a ding here in the face, and the cable's sheath is got a ding in it from being stuffed through our mounting pole. Another disadvantage for us is that when we're in route somewhere actively traveling, we can't really use it. For example, if we just stop quickly at a grocery store, we can't check our email or update the maps or whatever. Or if we're street camping in a small town, I can't just lay it out on the street. I need to somehow get it up to the roof in a secure location, and that's really a pain in the plantain. So let's cut this thing off. Now, I imagine some of you have already commented, isn't that leg needed for aiming the dish at the satellites? And while that was true in the beginning when there were only a few hundred satellites, now that number is up in the thousands and they're launching 60 more every week. So in fact, the dish can point straight up and using its phased array antenna, direct the beam and still get great signal. Not only have I proven that to myself by placing the dish on two chair backs and letting the leg swing around, or other times I've used a ratchet strap to restrict the movement of the dish and keep it flat. But many, many other people have already cut the leg off the dish. And the nail in the coffin of the motorized leg debate is that SpaceX now offers a high performance flat mount dish. The only catch is that it's $2,500 bucks, five times the cost of this one. So I'll settle for my "Medium Performance Flat Mount Dish™" So let's tie into this! Like I said, there are many others who have cut this open before me and I've gleaned all I can from watching their videos. And to summarize what I've learned, there are two sections inside the antenna. The business end is the phased array antenna, and it's basically just flat. It's the first two centimeters at the front of the dish, and that's where all the electronics are housed. And that compartment is completely sealed. There's no screws, no way to open it short of cutting it open and cutting it off. And the second compartment is here at the back of the dome, and that's where the motors live and it's vented to the atmosphere. Because this connection here where the leg meets is not sealed, they have little air vent/drains you can see here in the corners. And that is basically the outline of where we need to cut to cut off the motorized section. So I've just powered it up to get the leg upright. Now we can unplug it and cut it off. Now of course I could do like everyone else, take my side grinder and cut the majority of the plastic off, but then I would need to seal everything up to keep the electronics water tight. And given my working conditions here in the dirt and the grass and the side of the road in Ecuador, I'm not confident that I'll be able to do that. Further, there's really no benefit for me because I already have this giant expanding solar array on our roof that's 11 centimeters tall. And so there's no benefit in me making this any thinner than that. So to minimize the risk of damage to the antenna array itself and to mitigate any risks of it not being sealed up properly and humidity and moisture getting into the antenna compartment, I'm not even going to breach into there. Instead, I've marked a line one centimeter inset from the 4 vent holes, and I'm going to drill the corners and then cut that off and then that will access only the vented motor compartment. Okay, welcome to my office everyone. While I'm covered in dust and stuff. I'm going to switch to a flap disc and just go around the whole perimeter here in preparation for gluing it to my 3D mount. That way I just need to clean up once. So there it is all cleaned up. As I showed, I took a flap disc to the perimeter to give it a little bit of bite, little "tooth" for the adhesive to grab onto. And the inside turned out really nice. The cut came out perfectly where I wanted it to, and I have about a foot of ethernet cable ready to tie into. Now as far as mounting, of course, I thought about using some angle aluminum profile and make a frame around the perimeter and then somehow, you know, build it up so that it was four inches up off the surface. And I even have this aluminum profile that came from a salvaged solar panel and that actually hugs the side of the dish perfectly, but it's not deep enough. So again, I would've needed to cut the whole back off and then find an aluminum plate that size and silicone it all closed. And so I wasn't interested in that. So I thought I'd kick it up a notch and CAD model myself, a socketing wedge mount. Now there are a couple of cottage industry outfits that make such flat mount dishes already they're vacuum formed or CNC cut from a solid plate of heavy plastic and then you would cut the whole thing off and silicone it into the mount. But they cost almost as much as Starlink itself, and I probably can't even ship it to Ecuador anyway, so as I said, I designed my own wedge mount. I made it so the back edge is at the same height as the solar array on the roof, and the front is as low as it can go before the body of the dish hits the roof. That gives it a little bit of a slope to allow the rainwater to run off. Then I just needed to match the shape of my mount to match the contour of the back of the dish. Thankfully, SpaceX has provided CAD models for our dish. So all I needed to do was take that model and put it into my model and then create a cavity and subtract from my mount so that it matched the contour of the dish. Now of course, I can't print something this big on my printer, so I split the model up into six pieces and then I added these 10 centimeter long pieces of aluminum angle in there to span the joints and then the screws run through here and that'll give it some strength across the joint. And then they also serve as my mounting tabs, which will be glued down to our roof surface using Sikaflex®. Anyway, those mounting tabs allow me to pull the screws and just lift the whole thing off the roof if I ever need to take it off for whatever reason. Then it was time to print out all six segments. The larger L-shaped pieces took about 16 hours each to print, and the straight ones were about 12 hours, so about 90 hours of printing over the course of a week. Once the printing was done, I removed all the supports from where the aluminum reinforcement angles go. Then I glued the segments all together and sanded away the fuzzies and the worst of the layer lines. Then I gave it a couple coats of primer, couple coats of gloss white paint, and if you stand back and squint and set your YouTube player resolution to 240p, I'd say it looks pretty good. If you would like to have such a Starlink wedge mount, I freely shared the CAD files down in the description. It's about $15 worth of filament to print one out. It's a really good reason to get a 3D printer or get a friend with a 3D printer. Alright, so obviously we're going to need to connect the original connector back to this severed cable and we're not going to be able to reuse this proprietary connector. So off with his head. Dude! I wasn't ready. Anyway, I got a RJ45 shielded coupler and the crimp on connectors here. But before we can connect these two back together, I need to take this cable and string it through some holes in our rooftop solar array. Okay, so yesterday I crawled up here and flipped these two solar panels upside down and drilled holes through the aluminum frame and installed these 3D-printed grommets. So today all I needed to do was pull that wire through the grommet. Alright, so as you can clearly see, I'm up on the rooftop now with the dish ready to install. And now I just need to crimp on the the RJ45 connector so that we can use our watertight coupler. I did do a little bit of prep while I was on the ground. I separated and isolated the motor wires with shrink tubing. I've installed the aluminum angle mounting tabs, and I also took a wire wheel, which I still have on the drill, such a brass wire wheel, but it's pretty coarse and I gouged the bottom of these parts so that it's got some grip, some, some "tooth" in it. So that's the work I've done in advance. Now we're ready to connect the wires. So I've got the connectors here and the crimper and everything, but before we go crimping this together, something very important to know. And that is that SpaceX used a non-standard wire order for these wires. And so because they're using power on all four of the pairs and so the wires aren't in the right order, I'm not going to get into a ton of detail. Suffice to say that the wire order is different. So I'm going to refer to that swapped green and blue pair as X-Swapped. So that's the first thing to know. Let's get to crimping. So before I get too carried away and forget, I'm going to put the nut and the grommet from the wire coupler over the cable. It's probably possible to squeeze it over the connector, but I don't want to forget. Alright, so there it is all lined up. Orange-Stripe, Orange, Blue-Stripe, Green, Green-Stripe, Blue, Brown-Stripe, Brown. So got that all in and Kerchunk! And now we just do the same to the other side. Alright, I've got it all lined up on the insert here. Again, that wire color, Orange-Stripe, Orange, Blue-Stripe, Green, Green-Stripe, Blue, Brown-Stripe, Brown. That just helps line all the wires up with their respective positions on the inside. You want to make sure they've all come to the front of the connector, as they have. And crimp. So like I said, this is a shielded, supposedly watertight coupler. So you put these nuts over here and then this rubber gland in there as you tighten this, hopefully you guys will be able to see the blue plastic gets compressed, pardon me, the blue rubber gets compressed uptight against the shield. So as I said, I've cut some extra slots in here for zip ties and I did that because I found this coupler fits really nice up inside there. And just for future self future-proofing, I put some wire flags on these cables marking that they are X-Swapped so that I don't mix them up in the future. Pretty unlikely I would, but that's that. And then the cable just comes out this little slot up here. And we're basically ready to stick it down. Alright, so I'm going to glue down about here. And like I said before, I'm going to use Sikaflex® to bond those aluminum brackets directly to our composite panels. And like I said before, again, that's how our whole sliding pneumatic solar panel array, it's glued down and all of these composite panels that make up our living quarters on our truck, they're all just glued to these aluminum frames. These rivets really don't count for much for the overall strength of this thing. But surface prep is super important because if you were to just glue this down to the gel coat, it's so smooth and shiny or you know, your clear coat on your Sprinter van, it would just peel off and Starlink, or solar, or whatever you're gluing down would just go flying. So surface prep is super important. So I'm going to first pop the dish out here find where I want to put it And then mark those positions on the roof and then give them a little bit of a scuff. Another trick I used while building the truck was to use a gasket or a spacer in between the aluminum and the composite panels. And that allows the Sikaflex® to flex. If you just put together the two parts you're trying to join and squeeze out all the adhesive, there's nothing left to flex. And so here I'm doing kind of the same thing with some 3M VHB, just putting a strip at the front and the back of each of these tabs so that when I put the Sikaflex® down and set it in place, that it acts as a little bit of a spacer so that all of the glue doesn't squeeze out the sides. And it's also nice because then it doesn't slide around on you while you're moving it. Alright, so there's nothing left to do, but do her. Put a bead all the way around except for where the VHB is. Good luck buddy. As you can see, it just squeezed out so nicely all the way around, Nothing left but the tabs now. I think this is what they call the money shot. So there it is mostly done. I've gotta come up here yet and install the solar panels properly. But this is good to go. If I was using the original Starlink toaster, er uh, router, I could just plug this in and I probably will and it will work just fine. But instead I'm going to do this elabrate PoE injection system and we'll get to that in a moment. But first let's do a free "no strings attached: giveaway. So our last video, I did a little mini review on the pale blue AA and AAA rechargeable batteries and the folks at Pale Blue were so happy about that they said they'd supply one of their home conversion kits as a give away in one of our future videos. How cool is that? The home conversion kit normally sells for $250 and includes 12 AA batteries, 8 AAA batteries, 4 9V, 4 D cell batteries, plus of course all the cables that you need for charging and all you have to do to enter the contest is name this dish. SpaceX calls these Dishy McFlatface, which of course is an homage to Boaty McBoatface, which was a boat named in in Britain using an online contest, much the same as this. So in keeping with this theme, put your best name forward for this dish. The suggestion with the most thumbs up 30 days after this video goes live will be sent the home conversion kit anywhere in the US free shipping courtesy of Pale Blue Earth. I don't know, I'm thinking something like Stumpy McSquareface, or something like that. So that's a freebie. Go put it down in the comments and everyone thumbs up that one. Anyway, let's go back inside and void our warranty once again for the second time. Welcome back everyone. Today is three days from now and as you can see I've got the Starlink here on the counter with all of the surplus cable still in a heap. So we'll be dealing with that. And Starlink has been working great flat mount even though it's been shooting through a little bit of trees we have above us. It's good. And a kind of a funny thing when I open the debug data in the app, it shows the mast is near vertical and the motors are healthy, which I guess it's true, they're probably still in good shape. Another interesting point is for the last couple months of my testing, I would restrain the dish and prevent it from moving until it triggered the motors obstructed error on the app and then it would just stay flat and it could point at the sky, but it would take 15 minutes or so for it to decide that the motors aren't working and then to turn on the antenna and try and find the satellites regardless. And I notice now it turns on and connects within 60 seconds. So that's very interesting. And there's no motor obstructed or motor stuck warnings any longer. Another thing I thought was interesting is the obstruction map that the app has inside showing the visibility of the sky. It would normally be pointing kind of at an angle up to the north and now ours shows it's completely flat so it knows the dish is flat. I thought that was pretty interesting. Okay, as I'm sure you're aware, this is the Starlink wifi base station router unit and it's not ideal for overlanders or RVs because it's powered from 110 or 230-volts AC wall plug power. There's no power brick that converts 110 to 12-volts, for example or 110 to 48-volts DC, so you can't just cut the wire and connect it to 12-volts. It's a little bit more in depth of a procedure to convert these. It is possible. I did consider going that route to convert these to DC power. You can actually slip a thin guitar string in behind the glass sheet and wrap that around screwdrivers, pull it through. And then there is a separate power supply board and a separate WiFi "brain board" and there's I think it's a six pin header with 48-volts and 12-volts. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail, but if you're interested in that that's an option for you. Anyway because this is 120-volt mains power only that we need to run our inverter all the time just to power Starlink, effectively converting our 12-volt solar and lithium battery bank to 110-volts to power the Starlink, which then converts it back to DC voltage to power dishy. And while it's not pulling that much power, 30 to 40-watts in my testing, our inverter, is the 3kW Victron inverter, it has some overhead as well. A listed efficiency of 93% and a no load consumption of 25-watts. So that adds 50% overhead just to power the dish. Secondly, although the Starlink router is very user friendly, it has very little in the way of advanced features such as load balancing, DHCP assignment, and guest networks, something our MoFi 5500 has in spades. Thirdly, there are no ethernet ports on this router. You can buy a $50-ish dollar ethernet adapter, but as it stands now all of our traffic needs to go to our MoFi 5500 and then through the wifi repeater function to the Starlink. So everything's going over wifi twice. Not to mention with the cables coming out the back and no flat edges on this whole thing, it's kind of a pain to mount anywhere in a semi fixed way. So instead we got this power over ethernet injector, which will inject the power from this 12-volt to 48-volt boost converter and inject the PoE power into the ethernet cable up to the dish. And then the output from this end goes to the WAN port on our MoFi router. The better benefit of this is that I can use the MoFi's load balancing to provide internet from any source that's available, Starlink, cellular, or the wifi repeater, and distribute it to all of our devices inside the truck. And it's actually really easy to do despite how complex this diagram makes it look. We just need to crimp on three more connections and feed some 48-volt power into the PoE injector. And the other reason I want to cut the wire is because it's still ridiculously long, so we'll trim it to something more reasonable. This of course is the wire that was run up to our rooftop. We'll cut that here and we have it ready to go. Again, Orange-Stripe, Orange, Blue-Stripe, Green, Green-Stripe, Blue, Brown-Stripe, Brown So that's the cable from the roof crimped. And I put a strain relief and tab protector on there as well as a X-Swapped flag so that I don't forget down the road. Now the PoE injector does have the "Data In/Out" and "PoE In/Out" and the "DC power +/- " labeled, but they're kind of faint, and they're on the back. So I've added big bold red labels. So now I know that dishy plugs in here. Now we just need to make a patch cord from the PoE injector to the router. That bigger jacket is quite tight to get in the connector, but it is doable. I forgot to mention earlier, but this end that connects to the router uses the conventional T586B wire color pattern. Orange-Stripe, Orange Green-Stripe, Blue, Blue-Stripe, Green, Brown-Stripe, Brown. So there's my little patch cable made! One end with the X-Swapped wire order, and one end that's the conventional T586B wire order. All right, there it is, ready to go. I've 3D-printed a little wall mount bracket to hold that up and so I'll be mounting that up here by our router. But first I want to do a little experiment. Because I've cut off 57.284 feet of cable, I've crimped on an X-Swapped end onto the original router end of the cable. And I'm going to use one of these couplers. To connect this back and then I'm going to run it off of the Starlink router with much less cable and run that through our Kill-A-Watt meter and see if the wattage has dropped by a measurable amount. So with this much cable removed, the power consumption does seem to be lower. It is bouncing around between 27 and 40-watts and I'll need to set this to watt-hours (Wh) and let it run for an hour to average the time over an hour, but it looks like it might be a little bit less just from the reduction in this length of cable. Another benefit of putting this X-Swapped connector on the router end of the cable is that I can just use a coupler like this as I'm doing now and run it in its original configuration. If I ever need to do that for a firmware update or for some reason it's required, I can still easily do that. So I've got it all installed up behind our second monitor here. You'll need to forgive the close quarters videography, but there it is. So this should all be very clear by now, but basically our wire comes down from the roof along this air conditioner duct and then pops up here into the PoE injector. The power DC to DC converter gets its power from inside this compartment and then it just runs up into the connector and then of course the patch cable goes into the WAN port on the router and then to tidy up the wires, I designed these CAT5 wire clips that are just held to our roof with command strips for a nice clean install and there's not much else to it. As soon as I powered it up, the MoFi Router took a IP address from the dish and it came online as if it was a cable modem that just got plugged into the WAN port. And I won't bore you with the test rig but I did do some power consumption testing with the system as you see it now and over two hours, it averaged 28-watts. So that's a lot better than what it was before. Well, there you have it, our amputated Starlink dish flat mounted on the roof in a 3D-printed mount, powered by a DC to DC boost converter. A huge thank you to our supporting channel members, especially the Elon Tier member Phurious George. He's up the pesos this month for our Starlink service. So thank you very much!! Our channel is member supported. It's the contributions of these fine folks that make it possible for us to make these videos for you guys without telling you about our sponsor. So if you'd like to be listed among these legends, click the JOIN button down below and check out the options that are available to you there. Don't forget to go in the comments and vote for the best name you can come up with for our Stumpy McStumperson flat mount dish. The Pale Blue Battery Home Conversion kit contest will end 30 days from the day this video goes live. So vote early, vote often. Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you next time.
Info
Channel: Everlanders
Views: 236,391
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Flat Starlink, Flatmount Starlink, Starlink RV, Starlink 12v, Starlink DC Power, Starlink Hack, Starlink PoE, Starlink Tycon, Starlink Remove Leg, Flat Mount Starlink, Starlink Overlander, Starlink Colombia, Starlink Ecuador, Starlink In Motion
Id: gRSnTMrUPrQ
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 33min 34sec (2014 seconds)
Published: Tue Dec 20 2022
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