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god I hate phone apps
Sunday, May 26 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
[REDACTED]
Today promised to be sunnier than yesterday, which is always an improvement when you drive an electrical vehicle. We'd arrived that the cabin with more than 80 miles of range, which would normally be enough to make it back to Hurley on its own. But every now and then something happens on the drive (particularly the one we'd recently made with Kelly and Brian) that somehow throws the car off. I'd had leftover custom pizza for dinner last night, and that was also what I had for dinner (though by then I was eating Christine's leftover pizza, which had olives and no banana peppers).
At some point Gretchen snuck off with Charlotte and went down to the dock, leaving Neville sunning himself out on the east dock. The plan for this weekend was to put Neville in a muzzle when we got to the dock if he should follow us down there (thereby rendering him incapable of getting a mouthful of porcupine quills), but today he never followed any of us there.
In the late morning, before Gretchen had headed off for the dock, I found myself building yet another relay-switched outlet in the basement. Since the loads I anticipated switching on this particular outlet would generally be low, I decided to use one of those cheap Chinese relays, the ones claiming to be capable of switching ten amp loads (but which had self-destructed when switching a 16 amp load that had been split between both of its switched poles). Because of the bad experience with such a relay in the past, this time I placed it inside an all-metal box, hoping to contain the damage should it catch on fire. I mostly pre-assembled the box containing the relay and the duplex outlet it controls upstairs and then took it down to the basement and attached it to an existing one-outlet GFCI circuit installed by the electrician who had originally wired our basement. (I've been spreading the remote-controlled outlets across different circuits so that the total amperage of switchable current is maximized.)
After that, it was as simple matter of wiring both ends one of the pairs of avaiable conductors in a Cat-6 cable I'd run from the remote controller to the vicinity of the basement's northwest corner. This would allow the ULN2003-type circuit on the remote controller board to turn on the new relay and energize the circuit, which I wanted to use to algorithmically control the basement intake fan (that fan I'd bought at the Tibetan Center thrift store which had been controlled by a dumb thermostat). One reason for wanting to control it algorithmically (and remotely) is that the thermostat isn't sufficiently senstive for this application, and the fan ends up either running all the time or never depending on where I place the thermostat.
Once I added the device_feature record to my cloud-based control database, the fan should've been controllable. Unfortunately, something about the pin I'd chosen (GPIO #11 on the slave Arduino Mini Pro) caused the NodeMCU to crash the moment data was sent to it. It was such a bad crash that it locked up the NodeMCU and required physicial intervention before it would reboot. Obviously, if this were to have happened while I was remote, it would render the entire system unusable until I physically went to the cabin. I'd had crashes (though self-recovereable ones) when trying to use the GPIO9 and GPIO10 of the NodeMCU itself, but I hadn't expected any crashes at all when using pins on the slave Arduino. (Since the NodeMCU only has about seven usable GPIO pins once on-board flash, I2C, and serial are spoken for, I am forced to use a slave to get all the pins I need.) Interestingly, though, by using GPIO#13 instead of GPIO#11 on the slave Arduino, the crashes go away and the new circuit becomes controllable.
Meanwhile Gretchen had gone down to the lake with just Charlotte, meaning she hadn't had to use our new anti-porcupine muzzle. She came back while I was still puttering with my new remote-control circuit and reported that she'd gone for a nice swim and that the water was "warm." She also said there were some teenagers at the public dock while she was there, and she'd found the noises they were making distracting to the reading she likes to do on the dock, though she understood that on a beautiful afternoon the day before Memorial Day, one can't really begrudge the teenagers their fun, however stupid it happens to be.
When I was done with my circuit testing, I grabbed a beer (a Lord Hobo imperial IPA — it was pretty good) and walked down to the lake. When I got there, I seemed to be the only human there. The day was glorious, with big puffy white clouds, so I set out in the kayak and paddled down to the south lakeshore near the public dock. While I was there, Throckmorton the Loon popped up at the surface only a couple dozen feet away, and he was so big and sitting so low in the water that initially my brain couldn't process what sort of creature he was. Unfortunately, he vanished beneath the surface before I could snap a picture.
After I got back to the dock, I hiked over to the dams at the lake's outflow and added some rocks to the new dam that beavers had constructed last year thirty or forty feet downstream from the dam that controls the lake's depth. At this point, that dam is mostly a human artifact, and it manages to create a pond whose surface is only several inches below the level of Woodworth Lake itself. As I worked, mosquitoes attacked me mercilessly. I killed a fair number of them and probably so too did the squadron of circling dragonflies. But I ended up with lots of welts on my upper arms and neck.
Back at the cabin, I tried unsuccessfully to make use of a phone app designed to connect to the cabin's Generac generator. I'd tried to do this in the past, but never had any luck.) I had the app on my phone, but of course it was impossible to find because its name didn't contain the word "Generac." It was called "Mobile Link." How arrogant is it to come up with a name like that for your shitty software and expect people to know it has something to do with a generator? When I tried using the app, it asked for a username and password, assuming for some reason I would remember it (since the app had forgotten). When I went to reset the password, the app timed out, so I moved on to a much less frustrating activity. There's no provision in any of this process for someone wanting to connect to their generator from a web page; one must use the app, which means one must connect to his or her generator via a phone. But I absolutely hate the phone user experience. Part of the problem is that there is little commonality between interfaces provided by apps, forcing one to learn each one from scratch. (This reminds me of cameras back in the naughties that all came with their own proprietary file browsers, each one of which had a different interface. Why did they not just tell us to use the built-in file browser that we already knew how to use?) With the web, by contrast, we all know how web forms and URLs work. But I don't want to learn how to use someone's shitty app, and I don't like working on a tiny screen using buttons that aren't physical switches. Worst of all, most of these so-called "internet of things" (IoT) add-ons are really just new mechanisms for driving revenue. I think with the Generac internet connection, the damn thing phones home at various times so it can better nag the owner to buy Generac-approved supplies and services. As I recall, the generator can't be controlled form the app at all. Its only utility to me would be read-only data. But, since the only interface Generac provides is a phone app, it's likely there is no usable API. At least with my SolArk inverter there is a way to check the data on a real web page, which means there is a real API that I can tap into and to get actionable data, which was a requirement for the automation I recently implemented on my remote control system.
Late this afternoon after gathering some more rock for north retaining wall project, I encountered my first deer fly of the season, which I immediately killed.
A little before dusk, Gretchen took Charlotte on a walk out to Woodworth Lake Road. But as she approached Ibrahim's A-frame, she smelled what smelled like cooking meat. She didn't want get anywhere near that, so she turned around and went up Shane's driveway to his little slice of heaven (which he bulldozed clear of trees back in 2021
and which has come back mostly in hay-scented fern). While there, she saw a three-leafed plant she thought might be poison ivy, so she turned around and came back home. When she told me about the possibility of poison ivy, I was incredulous, as I'd never seen poison ivy in the Adirondacks. So had her take me to Shane's plot and show me. It turned out that the plant in question was some sort of berry-producing member of the rose family, perhaps some sort of raspberry.
Later this evening, I tried yet again to obtain data via RS-485 from our Navien boiler, but yet again it was all in vain.
Woodworth Lake today. Click to enlarge.
Our dock Lake today. Click to enlarge.
A cagey robin along the lakeshore. I don't know what robins eat here because there don't seem to be any earthworms. Click to enlarge.
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