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mystery microcontroller misbehavior
Saturday, August 9 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
At the cabin, Gretchen and I often write the letters of the day's Spelling Bee on a whiteboard so Gretchen can play it without looking at a screen (I look at a screen and transcribe what she shouts out, along with words I occasionally see). For weeks now there has been a face living inside the letter at the top of the seven-letter array (at the 12:00 position, if you will). Since that face needs to live inside a hollow character (he started inside an "O"), I always put the hollowest character in that position. This morning, though, the hollowest character was a "B," so I made an additional face in the lower hollow.
After such typical weekend morning cabin rituals, I turned my attention to building a cable to connect the outdoor ESP8266 Remote to the nearby propane tank. That particular ESP8266 remote already gathers the usual weather data and can easily monitor an additional analog value, such as, in this case, the signal coming from a linear hall-effect-sensor (a magnetic field strenght sensor) placed atop the Remote Ready fuel level gauge on the tank. (The gauge produces a magnetic field in proportion to the level of fuel inside, though my experiments with it have been underwhelming and I've decided I need to collect data as the fuel level gradually drops.) This required some soldering of the ends of Dupont connectors onto the ends of a wires within a length of ethernet cable. As I worked, I listened to a HackADay.com podcast streaming on my phone (so as not to eat into our cabin's mobile hotspot data allotment). But I kept having problems with the reliability of first the outdoor ESP8266 Remote, which hadn't transmitted any data since 6:00am, and then the other ESP8266s in the system, all of which seemed to be croaking on a version of a function called wifiConnect() that I'd foolishly let ChatGPT rewrite for me. Eventually I got the remotes in a reasonably stable state.
But by then, another problem was giving me a headache: the Moxee hotspot kept being rebooted by the watchdog because it couldn't get an internet connection. I thought maybe Cricket's algorithms were confused by my need last weekend to purchase more bandwidth. But when I got through to a tech support guy, he revealed that I was the confused person. I'd thought I'd bought ten gigabyes of bandwidth for $10 but had only bought five, a number that had just been exceeded. So I had to buy five more. In the midst of all that, I realized I needed better manual controls for my hotspot watchdog, particularly a way to reboot the cellular hotspot manually (so I don't have to reach awkwardly to the device itself to push a button built into it). And I also needed a way to manually reboot the watchdog, as its built-in reset button was inaccessible due to how I'd mounted it. I needed pushbutton switches but didn't have any, so I ended up making my own leaf switches from scratch using picture hanging hooks that I'd hammered flat for leaves. They look like they're made of brass, but I think they're actually steel. Using some tiny screws I'd recently got online (you can't get tiny screws at hardware store), I secured them to the board on which all hotspot watchdog electronics are mounted, and the new switches worked great. (That's unexpected when building something so improvised so quickly!)
By the time I was done with that, I was eager to go down to the lake.
So I grabbed a beer and some Ryobi batteries and headed down the Mossy Rock Trail. At the dock, Gretchen and the dogs had already been there a non-trivial number of hours.
My first task down there was to cut the rest of the way through that red maple branch that was blocking the sunlight on the dock after a certain hour. This took a lot of persistence, but eventually I cut through enough for gravity to do the rest. This unlocked more than an additional half hour of sunlight for the dock, though it was somewhat speckled by shadows cast by the leaves of some remaining branches.
At around this time, Gretchen and the dogs headed back up to the cabin. I stayed behind and used the canoe to gather additional rocks from lake bottom, this time off a prominent rocky cape that is part of our parcel. I used these rocks and those from yesterday to greatly improve the dock's ice wall, the thing that breaks the monolithic ice along a strategic line to minimize winter damage to the dock.
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I also used black and yellow paint to conceal the ugly white wire now running visibly from a tree over to the propane tank (the wire I'd installed this morning). A stochastic mix of yellow and black results in a greenish grey that was perfect for making the wire blend into the background to the point that one would have to know it was there to be able to see it.
I went to bed fairly early, and when I did, Gretchen expressed disappointment that I didn't join her for a walk lit by the moon, which was close to full.
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Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium) growing along the bluestone path to our front door. It gets seed pods that, when dry, split into five pieces, releasing thousands of tiny parachutes. Also note the bigtooth aspen on the right. We will be in an aspen jungle in a few years if we don't hack those off. Click to enlarge.
The cabin, surrounded by wildflowers and weeds. We're looking northeast. Click to enlarge.
The Moxee Watchdog ESP3266 system. Note the leaf switched I'd made from flattened picture hanger hooks in the upper left. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250809 feedback
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