Late stage capitalism. You can’t expect year over year growth for eternity without running into a resource cap. Profit growth is all the shareholders care about because it’s literally written into United States economics laws that investors get paid first. All these dirty tricks and bad decisions are coming from CEO’s with limited understanding of the effects of their policies, trying to push for an extra 2% on top of their already obscene margins

Ok so, replacing the head unit might work?

Is there anything a mildly competent electronics enthusiast could do to disable any outbound data?

Certainly! I’m not sure when I’ll get around to actually doing it, but my intent was to create an emergency boot drive to send to my elderly family members that they could plug in if the system ever started acting up, and I’ll build it in such a way that it’ll be able to be booted as a Linux live USB, and also have a Windows partition for any tools that I might need for remote access and in-system diagnostics.

I’ve built a few scripts for the Linux bootable but I can’t seem to remember where I stored that particular repo at the moment, so I’ll share later.

Some of my stuff is up on my GitHub (same username)

Thanks a ton for all the advice! 👍🏼

This sounds like a perfectly workable solution!

I assume getting a persistent environment in a USB recovery stick is a bigger task? I’m imagining that, with your method, I would need to repeat this process any time I wanted to update the image or load specific new kernel modules/drivers?

Customizing a base distro sounds like a good place to start 👍🏽

Hijacking for my own idea: what if I wanted to make my own updated version of say, hiren’s Linux environment that included tools for data recovery and drive administration among other things. I would love to basically build my own custom recovery environment preloaded with all my favorite tools.

Tbf, with a few hours of googling, I could probably figure this out for myself so don’t go through a bunch of trouble unless you want to document for others. I’m mainly posting because I saw OP and wondered if something easy already existed?

Lol so he put even less effort into it than we thought

👏⏱️👏

Let us know how it goes!

The stepper drivers run directly of the main power supply through Vcc, so assuming you haven’t added any extra heaters or other crazy amounts of power draw, you should be just fine adding another motor.

Using the second z for stability would be a more traditional use of those parts but your idea sounds like a lot of fun!

You can’t both bridge your current router and use it for WiFi AP because of the hierarchy of the network. You’ll need either a compatible AP-capable WiFi radio in your be router (hard to find, limited compatibility, I think you might top out at WiFi 4e (ac1350) in terms of what hardware is available.

Alternatively, you can use a dedicated access point alongside your new router which is easier and will get you better, more up to date, technology