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the bravery of gentlemen with guns Wednesday, November 20 2024
At this point, the wall I've been working on about 200 feet south of the house at the bottom of the Woodshed Trail is developed the kind of momentum to sustain its own construction. I don't mean its momentum in a physical sense, of course, because a wall can have no such thing. I mean its momentum as a concept in my mind, one that keeps drawing me back to make further improvements. With me, such things can get a little unhealthy, but the obsession can produce amazing things occasionally. Mind you, I'm not an especially competent builder of stone walls. I tend to work sloppily, particularly at first, and the wall starts out looking like a jumbled pile of rock. But over time I fill in the remaining voids and build up little support stacks to reach up to rocks that seem precarious, and after enough of that it develops its own beauty. It doesn't closely resemble a traditional bluestone wall, as I'm less concerned with its utility and the rocks I tend to use are smaller and of more random shapes. The wall ends up being more curvy and less obviously solid, though my experience with the big wall I built just south of the Chamomile in 2019 is that my walls hold up well over time, experiencing few structural failures. (I've had less luck with retaining walls, such as the ones I'd built in front of the house. After nearly 20 years of frost heave, they all need to be rebuilt.)
I returned to this wall several times today, usually working on it while listening to just the audio part of an episode of Alone streaming from YouTube back on my computer (broadcast on a local FM frequency). That show is very visual, but the audio somehow works by itself. It's a reality show where survivalists try to outlast each other in some particularly bleak wilderness such as Great Slave Lake. But what struck me was how many of the contestants were obsessed with concerns about wild animals. It's hard to imagine that anyone with real experience in nature would have such concerns; the more time I've spent in nature, the more it's provided evidence that the animals within it are harmless. I've encountered mother bears with babies, supposedly the fiercest of animals, and they always just wanted to get away and be left alone. A couple of the guys on Alone talked almost exclusively about their concerns about predators, and one of them lasted only one night. In their backstories, they talked a lot about how they carry guns everywhere they go, which suggested they live in constant fear. On the show, though, they weren't permitted to have guns, and they quickly wilted. This made me wonder if perhaps guns are all that some people have allowing them to face their crippling fears, and without them they are sniveling cowards.
This afternoon, I started on a project to build a optocoupler board for my SolArk Co-pilot, since I wasn't entirely comfortable with the mechanism it was using to turn the generator on. That mechanism uses small relays that can be controlled with a 3.3 volt digital signal. But the problem with that relay board is that it turns on the relay with a digital low instead of a digital high, while in my ESP8266 Remote Control system, the concept of "on" is represented by digital high. I could simply switch this in my mind when controlling it, but that could get confusing and lead to errors. Or I could have a configuration in the controller software that flips the logic when set. But that too could lead to confusion and errors. So the way I left things at the cabin is that the relay is always energized to keep the generator from turning on. But the moment it isn't energized, the generator comes on. This can lead to all sorts of problems. For example, if the Co-pilot fails in the way that the east-basement remote controller failed a few days ago, the relay controlling the generator would go to a state where it would turn on the generator, which then couldn't be turned off unless I drove to the cabin. My plan to build an optocoupler board was to solve that problem and perform the generator turn-on with positive logic while also implementing it in a way that uses a minimum of electricity (optocouplers are much more efficient than relays). But before I started working on that, I did some internet searching and found a schematic for the relay board I was using. I then realized that if I cut four traces and carefully soldered in some jumper wires (to, in some places, surface-mount resistors), I could make a relay board with the positive logic I needed. This would still be a relay board and not an optocoupler board, but it could stand in while I wait for an optocoupler board to arrive on a slow boat from China (thereby making it so I do not have to build one at all).
I worked cautiously with a razor blade and my smallest-tipped soldering iron and managed to get it almost working. But I'd cut a trace to one of the surface-mount resistors on the wrong side, meaning it was now useless. The solution to this turned out to be an easy one: I just had to solder in a discrete through-hole 1kΩ resistor (salvaged from an old radio) from one pin to another on the back of the PC board. When I tested the modifications, I was delighted to see that it worked as intended.

The new wall at the bottom of the Woodshed Trail, looking north back towards the house (which is visible).
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The new wall at the bottom of the Woodshed Trail, looking north back towards the house, which has a light on. (I took these pictures at dusk.)
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The new wall at the bottom of the Woodshed Trail, looking north from a greater distance.
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The new wall at the bottom of the Woodshed Trail, looking southeast.
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The new wall at the bottom of the Woodshed Trail, looking south.
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