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a day for water hammocks
Sunday, August 10 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Following our normal Sunday morning routine (which, for me today, including makng myself a vegan BLT), I turned my attention to an irritating issue from yesterday that was back once more: the ESP8266 Remote inside that electrical box out by the propane tank had lost contact at 1:30am this morning and stopped transmitting data, and various experimental fixes (like power cycling it) were failing to bring it back online. When I hooked a laptop up to the ESP8266, I could see that it was repeatedly crashing, producing a huge mess of hexadecimal values. I asked ChatGPT about this, and it suggested I install the ESP Exception Decoder to see where in my code the crash was happening. To my amazement, the Exception Decoder was able to give me the actual line number of the problem. But it turned out that the problem was coming when the ESP8266 read values from a BME680 sensor over I2C, a problem that was most likely coming from an unreliable connection. This made sense given that I use crappy Dupont connectors that I get for cheap on eBay, and their metal contacts seem to go bad after only a handful of insertions (something I've recently figured out I can correct by strategic application of the tip of a tiny screwdriver). So I tried swapping out the suspect cable with a fresh new one. But that didn't help, and neither did swapping out either the NodeMCU or the BME680 I2C weather sensor. Subsequent tests indicated that the crashes seemed to happen more often if the ESP8266 was having trouble getting a connection. But I never figured out what was going on. Something subtle was playing out somehow between some combination of components and conditions. When I'd altered enough of those, though, the ESP8266 began transmitting data reliably.
I took that as a win and headed down to the lake, where it was so sunny that Gretchen had deployed the umbrella. It was genuinely hot today, perhaps for the first time for us in the Adirondacks this season. I climbed up in the tree whose branches block her light at around 4:00pm to see if there were any more troublesome branches I could reach with the pole saw, but they were too far away. So I climbed into one of those cheap two-floater "water hammocks" to have a nice soak in the lake. (They're only comfortable when it's hot.) Gretchen got in one too and we both tooled around near the dock that way, marveling at the glorious day and how we're pretty much the only people in the lake's homeowner's association who spend any time on or near the lake. Then we noticed that the canoe, which I'd hooked over something half-assedly on the edge of the dock, had somehow come free and drifted over to the shore. So I got out of the water and retrieved it, eventually paddling it a short distance north along the shoreline to gather more stones. But the place I was getting them from was a treacherous mix of depths surrounded by slippery surfaces, and when the canoe started drifting away, I couldn't get a firm enough footing to grab it, and drifted off towards the middle of the entrance to the outflow bay. But Gretchen was on it; she dove off the dock and swam over to it in about five minutes and then towed it back to me so I could finish my rock harvesting. I then used those rocks to do further work on the "ice wall."
Back at the cabin, I went and [REDACTED], getting all sweaty in the process. After hosing down my armpits and eating my second vegan BLT of the day, I turned to more masochistic pursuits. This took the form of impulsively testing the Moxee watchdog's ability to fix hotspot connection problems by temporarily putting the hotspot into its useless "charging" mode (which is now easy to do with those leaf switches I added yesterday). I soon discovered that after resetting the hotspot, the ESP8266 then got stuck in what was essentially an endless loop trying to connect. It then occurred to, for the first time since I started working on this system, that perhaps the ESP8266, when waiting for a hotspot to appear, eventually just gives up, something it must not do if the hotspot is in the process of slowly coming back online. So I asked ChatGPT about this and it said that this sounded like what was happening. The fix was easy, though. All I had to do was put some code in the waiting loop to disconnect and reconnect on a regular basis (I chose to do it every ten seconds). This small improvement suddenly made the Moxee watchdog much more rapid and reliable at getting the internet reestablished after a failure.
Gretchen and I began our drive back to Hurley a little before 6:00pm, and, since she was driving, we took the Thruway. The drive took us a little under two hours. The time went quickly because we spent nearly the first half of it talking to Nancy on the car's speakerphone feature. We hadn't communicated with her since late June and Gretchen was a little worried that Nancy had "broken up" with her like so many other friends (Penny & David, Deborah D., Sara the Korean, Sarah the Vegan, Carrie & Michæ, etc.), but no, it was just that we'd been traveling, she'd been traveling, and somehow communication ceased for about six weeks. Among other details from our life, Nancy knew nothing about our trip to Sri Lanka. As for her, she and Ray had just bought a 2015 Prius and were excited by all its modern features (such as a back-up camera).
Gretchen under the umbrella on the dock while Charlotte lounges nearby. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte lounges above the recently-expanded and improved "ice wall," that line of rocks in the water. Click to enlarge.
Neville on the shore above the dock, where the shade was better and there weren't even many flies. Click to enlarge.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?250810 feedback
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