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generically reading sensor values
Tuesday, November 19 2024
I made further progress on the retiling project, which at this point consists of me playing Tetris with my "library" of bluestone pieces and then using a cold chisel to remove material from where the pieces are going. I'm still unsatisfied with the arrangement I've come up with, but it's pretty good, and will be better if I can break some pieces in custom ways to they fit better. Unfortunately, I don't have my tile saw or my "fucked" saw (the cheap Black & Decker power saw with a diamond blade on it and failing bearings), since they're still up at the cabin. To help expand my library, I returned several times to the stone wall I am building along the new stone causeway at the bottom of the mountain goat path behind the woodshed. There aren't a lot of good pieces among the jumbled talus nearby, though every now and then I find one and put it aside. Mostly, though, my focus down there is to improved the stone wall, which is something I can easily obsess about. It had been a chaotic jumble of rocks, but by this evening it was looking like a respectable stone wall nearly three feet in height and maybe 30 feet long (though it tapers off near its east end as it is punctuated by a couple trees).
Another project I worked on was one where I attached a linear Hall-effect sensor (a three-pin analog device that visually resembles a transistor) to an ESP8266 flashed with my remote control firmware. The idea was to see if I could use it to detect the magnetic fields associated with positions indicated on a Remote Ready analog gauge. (I'd brought the one from the cabin's propane tank back with me to Hurley for such experiments.) I was delighted to find that my remote control firmware is so generic and capable that I didn't have to make any changes to it to support reading and (and then retransmitting to the server) data from the ESP8266's solitary analog pin. All I had to do was add a configuration string to its sensor configuration in its config.c file, something that isn't technically even necessary (since such configurations can be sent to the ESP8266 from the server as it starts up). The backend wasn't yet setup for logging esoteric non-weather data like propane levels, though I have an idea for how this can work using one of the four "reserved" fields it receives. I can make them vary from device to device and perhaps have a way to specify what data was saved given a device (or device_feature) ID.
Once I was seeing this Hall-effect sensor data being generated live, I tried to figure out what the trend of the values were given how I might place the sensor in the Remote Ready slot. To see what those numbers might be, I held a magnet under the gauge to make it read different values. The thing I'd been noticing, though, is that the gauge seemed to respond to magnet field-line orientation, not strength, whereas a Hall-effect sensor only cares about field strength and polarity. But somehow Hall-effect sensors are used to do what I am tryig to do, so hopefully I can figure it out. Unfortunately I can't change the float levels inside the propane tank to see how the mechanism actually communicates with the outside world. I might end up just recording the values I get from the Hall-effect sensor at different levels of liquid propane in the tank and come up with some algorithm to convert the former into the latter.
Later this afternoon, I did a very minor cleaning jihad with the vacuum cleaner in the living room (Ray and Nancy were coming over for dinner) and both sets of stairs (Gretchen's parents were coming for Thanksgiving). Gretchen had prepped a bunch of food in the kitchen and then gone to pilates.
Gretchen ended up running late and Ray and Nancy arrived a few minutes before she did. (They didn't bring their dog Jack because he was spraying diarrhea everywhere.) Dinner consisted of Asian noodles in a nut sauce with bok choy, and there was also a salad. We talked about a variety of things for some time until the topic of the election came up. Ray initially didn't even want to talk about it, but we ended up discussing how the hacks and toadies Trump wants to put in his cabinet will likely further degrade and hollow out the government on many levels, particularly the military. Ray said Trump's pick for Secretary of Defense wants to "fire the woke generals." But being "woke" wasn't even a controversial a few years ago, so nearly all the generals have said and done "woke" things. And it's hard to see how firing all the generals is going to make the United States military more effective. Instead, it will destroy its institutional knowledge and likely leave it nearly as weakened as the Russian military. Vladimir Putin has shown everyone the consequences of surrounding yourself with incompetent yes men. Still, Putin's success in Russifying America (turning it into an oligarchy) will be studied for centuries as a geopolitical masterstroke. If only he hadn't Russified Russia first, it would've given him a formidable advantage.
Meanwhile Gretchen, who has been overcommitted this week with NYAF among other things, started doing prep for a meal she is making for a sick friend she knows through the bookstore. This friend has a kid who is purportedly allergic to just about every kind of non-animal protein, so Gretchen was making a mac & cheese using nothing but vegetables (potatoes and cauliflower mostly) for the "cheese." She insisted it tasted good, but I was skeptical.
Later, Ray told me about the things he's been watching on YouTube, especially a show from the History Channel called Alone, where individuals compete against each other to see who can survive the longest in a bleak remote environment entirely on their own. That sounded intriguing, so after Ray & Nancy left and I'd washed a bunch of dishes, I watched some segments of it and liked what I saw. It's also worth noting: a vegan would be unlikely to survive long in such conditions.
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