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Casper the Dalmatian
Friday, December 27 2024
Early this afternoon, Gretchen, who has been on something of a decluttering jihad, wanted go on a run to the dump (that is, the Hurley transfer station). We decided to also bring the dogs, though there was so much material to haul that we opted to take the Subaru Forester. While Gretchen was putting all those materials in the proper dumpsters, I walked the dogs from the edge of the transfer station to the forest behind the West Hurley Park, with the idea that Gretchen would be meeting me in the parking lot at the park. But as I approached the park, I saw a cop had just pulled into the parking area and was just parked there with nothing to do. Our dogs were off-leash at the time, of course, and that is the kind of infraction that a cop with nothing else to do can give us shit for, even with our white middle-age priviledge. But the dogs weren't in any hurry to come out of the forest, so I there I stood looking much like a criminal all alone in the middle of an athletic field with my hood over my head. Suddenly I saw a dog that wasn't Charlotte or Neville. He was a rubbery young dalmatian who came bounding up the trail, saw Neville, and ran away. But Charlotte had already seen him and there was no way for him to outrun her. Soon they were gleefully playing near the dalmatian's human companion, a youngish white guy. Fortunately, he wasn't the kind of guy who doesn't want his dog to meet other dogs. Soon all three dogs were playing, though it wasn't long before the damatian, who was eight months old and named Casper, started humping Neville and then licking his penis. "Neville loves other dogs, he doesn't mind!" I said. But eventually Neville started being annoyed with Casper and had to drag his now highly-inappropriate dog away on a leash.
Then I heard Gretchen's voice. She'd seen the cop and parked in another area on the other end of the park. Now she wanted to walk some more in the forest, though she seemed confused about direction, yet the low winter sun was shining brightly, making it clear to me (at least) which way was south.
On the drive back home, we stopped at Ken & Laura's place to pick up just about all we could carry of a kind of biomass fuel that their house had come with. They think it's ugly and takes up too much space, but for us, it's just another ready-to-burn fuel, one we don't have to work hard to obtain. It looks to be made mostly of wood chips and sawdust packed together in dense bricks about the size of an original Mac Mini.
This evening I wanted to assemble another Arduino IC slave for one of my ESP8266 controllers at the cabin (specifically the one running SolArk Co-pilot firmware). I wanted it to run at 3.3 volts and not use much power. Initially I considered using a Raspberry Pi Pico, a 32 bit 3.3v microcontroller with lots of pins, but in a conversation with ChatGPT, I learned that it used considerably more power than an Atmega328, so I decided to use either one of those or an Atmega32u4, since I have a fair number of tiny boards containing those and, given all the much more capable modern microcontrollers, slavery might be their highest calling. So I soldered some pins onto an Arduino Pro Mini (or something similar, flashed it with a slave firmware, and tried to use it to control an LED. It did not work at all.
This sent me down a distressing multi-hour timeline where I repeatedly assembled and flashed various eight-bit Arduino boards (including a full-size Arduino Leonardo) with slave software. But none of them worked. I inserted plenty of debugging code into the slave to see where it was failing. It seemed to be able to do exactly one IC receive event after booting (and all the correct data would appear, sometimes even correctly controlling a GPIO pin). But then it wouldn't work as an IC slave any longer. It could still execute commands in its loop() method, but I don't even use that functionality in an Arduino slave. As I worked, I kept communicating with ChatGPT, which was full of helpful ideas, including references to interrupt methods I'd never heard of. But nothing worked. I ended up going to bed with the thought that perhaps my getting IC slavery to work with my first ESP8266 Remote Controller was a historical fluke.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?241227 feedback
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