March Event Recap

Thank you to everyone who joined us for our March event!

Thanks to everyone who came out for our March PyData Pittsburgh meetup, and to Christopher Pitstick for a standout talk that blended Python, hardware hacking, and AI-driven development!

What began as a strange beeping noise in his Tesla solar setup quickly turned into a deeper exploration of a system that offered very little visibility out of the box. Chris built his own monitoring solution using PyPowerwall, Grafana, InfluxDB, and Raspberry Pi.

Fueling his way through mad vibe coding sessions at 2am with healthy provisions of Tesla TACOS, Chris uncovered hundreds of kWh in lost production annually!

What made this journey especially compelling was how central AI was to the process. Chris didn’t just “use AI”—he worked with it. With Chris as Captain of the development ship, his AI coding assistant helped him move faster across unfamiliar territory, from networking and iptables to electrical concepts and data pipelines. He emphasized the importance of staying in command: verifying outputs, catching edge cases, and knowing when the model was drifting off course.

Christopher’s talk also highlighted the importance of open source and working with a community, the challenges of working within closed ecosystems, and how data can be used as leverage when navigating vendors and warranty claims. From reverse engineering to late-night debugging sessions, this was a practical and candid look at modern problem solving across disciplines.

Take a live peek HERE at what Christopher’s custom built Tesla Solar dashboard is reporting off of his roof. How good is the solar sailing today?