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cold foggy April day in the Adirondacks
Saturday, April 5 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Unusually, Charlotte ended up snuggling with Neville and me for most of the night in the back bedroom instead of sleeping by herself on the beanbag or dog bed. Perhaps whatever neurosis caused her to do that has begun to evaporate.
After making a fire, coffee, and toast, and watching some YouTube videos (mostly about Donald Trump's hilarious tariff gambit), I fixed a number of little issues related to the ESP-8266s scattered about the cabin reporting data. The ESP8266 serving as a hotspot watchdog and upstairs weather monitor, for example, wasn't reporting data about the huge marine battery that keeps it working even through power outages. It turned out that all I had to do was specify the I2C address of its INA219. Another problem causing quick commands to fail on ESP8266s that didn't control relays turned out to be a problem with a script on the server. Then there was a problem getting weather data from the ESP8266 under the steps of the basement bulkhead entrance, which turned out to be a disconnected wire (I think).
With all that out of the way, I could return to a project I'd started back December: trying to control the cabin minisplit system remotely using ESP8266s. Back then, I'd found a set of Arduino libraries that could supposedly do this and also figured out (after destroying two NodeMCU boards) that Pioneer deliberately fucked with the order of pins in their "USB" interface. The code had changed a lot since December, so I had to create a new version of my minisplit copilot code, using the latest SolArk Copilot code as a basis. After many failed compiles and tweaks, I finally got the code working enough to actually run instant commands, the basic of minisplit control in my nascent system. But after multiple attempts to control the minisplit, it showed no evidence of being controlled. Clearly I needed to look into it in greater depth. But part of my problem was my improvised hardware, the USB cable I used to swap the signals so that I could actually do the communications without destroying my equipment. I'd put that together very crudely and in a way that didn't really allow for further experimentation, and now one of the wires had come loose from one of the pins. So I decided to shelve the whole project for the time being.
Somewhere in the midst of all that, I took a break to take Charlotte for a walk in the cold foggy rain. (I didn't have any jackets at all that fit me, so I had to bundle up using a couple long-sleeved shirts and something that vaguely resembled a poncho.) We went down to the dock, where the ice was noticeably more broken up that it had been yesterday. We then headed back to the cabin the little brook running down the Backwards Cliff gorge. That brook was running at full power. All the runoff from fast-melting snow had raised the level of the lake somehow even higher than it had been last weekend.
Later this evening, the fog was so dense that I had to go out and check it out despite the chill (though at least the rain had stopped). This time even Neville joined me on the walk, and we walked out to Woodworth Lake Road and then came home via an informal path I occasionally follow that starts in someone's parcel clearing and goes up to the clearing of our neighbor Shane.
Still later, I cleaned the sludge out of the upstairs bathtub and took a bath. The water still has a fair amount of sediment in it, but it seems to be gradually thinning out.
The state of the ice in the lake today. Click to enlarge.
The state of the ice, looking northeastward. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte today near the dock. Click to enlarge.
Neville on our driveway on the walk this evening. Click to enlarge.
This maple snapped off over the winter and then a large woodpecker excavated this hole, which is big enough to hold a softball. Click to enlarge.
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