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now I can use the EEPROM in my slaves
Saturday, October 25 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
As my consumption of coffee and toast and my playing of my version of Spelling Bee wound down, I returned to the surprisingly elusive task of producing reliable Arduino I22 slaves on Arduino nanos. By now my experience and conversations with ChatGPT had convinced me that my problem was a subtle one related to the firmware and configuration of the specific ThinkPad I use to upload most sketches to microcontrollers at the cabin. Solid evidence for this was the fact that the one slave I'd prepared using my main computer Woodchuck back in Hurley was solidly reliable. I decided that the foundation for producing good, servile slaves was to first burn good bootloaders. This time I'd remembered to bring a working USB TinyISP, though it took some doing to install the correct drivers, something I probably would've given up on had I not had a very patient ChatGPT to guide me through the process and respond to the numerous errors that I encountered along the way. Once I was reliably burning bootloaders with the fuses set to run the microcontrollers at 8 MHz, I then uploaded the latest version of slave firmware. This time, though, it seemed to run reliably, so I felt like I'd finally solved the reliability problem. I then proceeded to upgrade all the other Arduino slaves at the cabin with the new firmware, which will allow the slaves to do three things: serve as port expanders (their original function), serve as watchdogs (resetting the masters when they stop communicating), and serve as small stashes for configuration data. I also upgraded the master firmware in a few cases so the masters would now know to periodically "pet" the slaves (to keep them from biting).
With all that out of the way, I took Charlotte and Neville for a walk down to the lake. I sat on the dock for awhile scanning the lake for signs of life. I didn't see Throckmorton the Loon, but I didn't see any ducks either (which one usually sees migrating through at this time of year). When Neville finally arrived, I walked along the lakeshore, eventually returning to near our boundary with Joel's parcel north of the outflow bay (similar to part of the walk yesterday). While I was over there looking for tall white pines and spruces that had grown tall enough to reach the canopy (I found none of the latter), I saw Neville was still snuffling along the south shore of the outflow bay. I waved at him and he gave me a perplexed look, as if to ask how the fuck he was supposed to cross the 200 feet of water between us. Eventually he gave up and walked back to the cabin while Charlotte and I explored the boundary with Joel's devastated parcel all the way back to park-owned land to the north. We then headed back south along East Bifurcation Creek, ultimately returning to the dock and then back to the cabin via the Mossy Rock Trail.
There was some carpentry work I've been procrastinating on the upstairs deck, and with the Arduino I22 slave reliability issue solved, I really should've started on that. But something in me makes me want to procrastinate even when I have no reason to. This evening that procrastination took the form of me going down the Mossy Rock Trail to the place where it is about to descend a steep slope into the flatlands just above the Backwards Cliffs Gorge. There was a low spot the path crossed that I've been wanting to fill in somehow, so today I gathered various block-like rocks and arranged them in an array to make a crude causeway running about six inches higher than how the land had originally been. To gather these rocks, I initially went fairly far afield, even looking around from atop a rocky chunk of highlands just south of the Backwards Cliffs Gorge. This small promontory is cut off by steep terrain in all directions except south, as there is another steep-walled gorge just to its east (one I discovered over a year ago). Since such rugged terrain stretches across the entire width of Shane's parcel in its middle, it's difficult to see how he could ever have a convenient trail from his building site (which I call Shane's "little slice of heaven") and the place he is permitted to build a dock. It might be possible to have a hiking trail that bypasses the cliffs to the east, but then it would have to take a turn and go westward along the lakeshore.
At some point today I made a box of campanelle pasta, which I mostly ate with leftover bean soup Gretchen had made earlier in the week. As I was making it, I noticed a box of tri-color rotini pasta from the same company (Barilla) I'd just purchased was noticeably smaller. This seemed like solid evidence of shrinkflation.
Before drinking too much booze tonight, I ate a small amount of cannabis.
Neville and Charlotte with two different sizes of pasta box, showcasing shrinkflation. Click to enlarge.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?251025 feedback
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