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oh, it's little-endian now
Friday, November 21 2025
Today I made good further progress on figuring out where the values are in the dumps of serial data my SolArk Copilot has been sending to my backend. I'd found where battery percentage was in the data and then figured out that sixteen bit values were being sent lowest-significant-byte first, followed by most-significant-byte (that is, little-endian), which is the opposite of how they used to be sent (big-endian). Once I knew that, I could figure out where most of the values I'm interested in are, though I'd yet to find battery power (which is the only value that can be negative) or battery voltage (which isn't a value I actually have much use for). Hopefully I will eventually find solar-string voltage, a value I'd never found in the past, because that would be a good proxy for how sunny it is (and not affected by the state of the battery). A tool I found very helpful for seeing the difference between bytes in the same part of the data at different times of day was Notepad++. It displays text documents with tabs, and if one places the bytes in the same part of the data (but from different times) in two different tabs, you can see them change back and forth by just clicking on the tabs. [I didn't know this at the time, but this can be done even easier if you switch between tabs with the keyboard equivalents of Ctrl-Shift-PageUp and Ctrl-Shift-PageDown.]
This evening Gretchen and I went to La Florentina, the quirky (and unpretentious) Syrian-influenced Italian restaurant in Kingston, to meet our friends Greg and Z, the librettist and actor from Olive Bridge whom we hadn't seen since they visited us at the cabin this summer. We would be eating the usual thing we get there, sformato (aka "purple pie"), bread, and salad. This time we also be getting hummus. Since we'd last seen Greg and Z, we'd both gone on cruises, with us going down the Rhine to Amsterdam and them sailing in an ocean boat from Norway to Amsterdam. A discussion about how we would be celebrating Thanksgiving led into an interesting conversation about Greg's sister. Greg mentioned that every time he talks to his niece on the phone, he can hear his sister whispering lines to her for things to say, and he kind of wants to discuss this with her but doesn't know how to bring it up. And what is this for? Is the sister worried the kid won't say the right thing? Or that she won't say anything at all? Obviously there is an issue here about her concern about projecting an image, but why? Greg thought it had its basis in their father, who was obsessed with decorum and liked to tell stories about people who didn't exhibit it. I was amused by the whispering of lines from a parent to a kid, because Gretchen (and even my old girlfriend Bathtubgirl) has been known to do a milder version of this to me, prompting me to respond in cases where I seem distracted, perhaps out of concern that I will come off as excessively aspergery.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?251121 feedback
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