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from one snowy house to another across a snowless hundred miles
Saturday, April 12 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Overnight another inch of snow had fallen, covering the upwind side of the trees with a fairy-tale dusting of white. After getting the fire and perhaps other sources of heat going and having my normal Saturday morning rituals (including slices of sourdough bread with butter), I turned my attention to electronics projects. I wanted to take another stab at controlling the kitchen minisplit air handler with a variant of the ESP8266 code I'd flashed into my SolArk Copilot. I'd bought a collection of USB-A connectors (both male and female) that had screw terminals for all four conductors, and I thought this would be easier for me to experiment with than trying to solder wires onto the pins of a USB connector salvaged from e-waste. (Remember, the entire reason I have to deal with this is Pioneer's decision to scramble the normal arrangement of wires on a USB connector that they nevertheless labeled with an official USB logo.) But before I got to hooking things up, I first wanted to add some features to the minisplit version of the firmware. I wanted to migrate in the ability to query data from the ESP8266 using "instant commands" (similar to using a command line interface, though the interaction actually happens on a web page I built), and I also wanted to add various additional commands to that interace allowing me to retrieve more information. One such command was one that would allow me to dump out data collected from the serial port (which in this case would be communicating with the air handler's controller). Some of these features hadn't been introduced yet to the very similar SolArk Copilot's firmware yet, so I could also backport them to that while I was at it.
This time I was able to get an ESP8266 device to actually communicate while attached to the air handler, but nothing it was doing was affecting the air handler's operation. So I swapped the USB data wires, since it was possible that Pioneer had done this as well. But my ability to control the air handler remained elusive. That was when for some reason I decided to add another USB port as a tap off the other two to monitor with my laptop, perhaps thinking that I was working with simple serial. But doing this gives you nothing, so it was a waste of time. It actually was worst than a waste of time, because once the air handler starts communicating with the ESP8266, it takes one of the wires that I'd thought was a data pin and decides to run five volts on it. For some reason this hadn't done anything bad to the ESP8266, but when I had my laptop hooked up, this somehow managed to destroy that particular USB port, reducing its working count of USB-A ports from three to two. (I confirmed that something very bad had happened by sniffing that USB port and smelling a strong fragrance of magic smoke.) This was, of course, infuriating. Now that damn air handler hadn't just killed two of my NodeMCU ESP8266 boards with its user-hostile nonstandard "USB" implementation, but it had damaged my laptop. The moral of all this is that one needs to exhaustively test the voltage levels of nonstandard ports before hooking them up to standard equipment. Fortunately, for about $30 I can replace the USB daughterboard in the laptop with one that works, something I can do when install a new keyboard (which I will be doing soon; the old one had nonfunctional cursor keys and others that stick sometimes due to a drink spill).
After that demoralizing turn of events, I was done with working on the minisplit, at least this weekend. I spent the rest of my time at the cabin installing all the new functionality on the SolArk Copilot and investigating my options for perhaps installing an ESP8266 board in the heat-pump-based hot water tank so I can monitor its temperature data. A little before I left the cabin, I realized that new SolArk improvements was causing it to no longer transmit data or control devices once I'd sent it an instant command. But fixing it was as simple as changing a false in the code to a true.
On the drive home, the landscape I drove through was a winter wonderland until I got to the bottom of the Adirondack escarpment. The snow returned briefly as I drove through the Charleston highlands north of Schoharie and then disappeared for nearly the rest of the drive. I could see snow on the peaks of the Catskills as I drove though them, but this didn't come down anywhere near the road. But as I climbed the grade up the first line of Catskill foothills on Dug Hill Road less than a mile from home, the snow returned. It was about an inch deep around our house.
Meanwhile Gretchen had gone off to attend a Passover seder at Cathy & Roy's house in Dutchess County. She returned around 7:40pm, just as our friend Anna was arriving from Brooklyn. Anna would be spending a couple nights with us before heading on to Great Barrington. I'd made a very nice fire to drive off the mid-April chill, and we sat around talking about various things but of course not drinking anything because Anna is in recovery from all that. Gretchen had brought home some yummy leftovers from the seder, and (happily) none of it was real seder food. Instead, it consisted of things like rice, hummus, and faux meat patties. Gretchen said that during the meal, she'd actually tried some eggplant and cucumber, building on the progress she had made to start liking these vegetables under hypnosis. But she never really finished her thought on how that had gone.
The cabin, as viewed from the driveway as I was leaving today. The solar panels had shed the snow all by themselves. Click to enlarge.
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