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the scenario of when the slave is reset
Sunday, January 11 2026
In past winters, I've proved to myself that it's possible to gather all the firewood needed in a just-in-time fashion. All I need is a backpack and a battery-powered chainsaw, and in one outing I can get enough firewood to heat the house for a couple days. If I do that a couple times, I have a good surplus. The only problem with this methodology is that if it snows, particularly if the there is a deep snow, salvaging firewood becomes much more difficult. It's not just that the snow makes trudging through the forest more difficult, it's also that snow clings to the wood as I process it, and then I have to do extra work to eliminate it once I bring it indoors. For this reason, I've been avoiding firewood salavaging while there has been much snow on the ground. And this has meant that the huge indoor piles of wood I've built up on heroic days of salvaging gradually deplete in the snowy weather that follows. For example, I gathered a record seven backpack loads on December 26th just before a fairly snowstorm and haven't gathered any firewood since. So our indoor wood supply had depleted to just a dozen or so pieces by today. Fortuntely, the weather in recent days has been warm enough that I've been okay with not even having a fire, letting the minisplits handle all our heating needs on their own. This also meant that much of the snow on the ground has melted away, leaving large swaths of landscape snow-free. It was important, then, for me to resume the salvaging of firewood.
Late this morning I went out with the big chainsaw and and a weak off-brand battery and looked around for trees to process. I found a smallish oak near the east end of the Chamomoile Wall that I could cut into a few pieces, but that didn't amount to much. And there wasn't much else that looked like it would be dry enough to burn immediately. So I returned to the big fallen white ash lying across the seasonal Chamomile brook a hundred and fifty or so feet west of the Stick Trail. There were more pieces I could buck out of that, and I cut until the battery went dead (which it did distressingly early). Later I returned with the backpack to split the big chunks into pieces that would fit in the backpack. I ended up hauling two backpack loads back home, splitting them further, and bringing them inside. This substantially improved our indoor supply, though the wood was moister than I would've preferred.
Upstairs in the laboratory, I made further improvements to both the ESP8266 Remote code as well as the I2C slave code to not only support modes for the slave to use less power, but also to allow the slave to communicate its state better to the master. One of the things it needed to tell the master was that it had recently been reset, which would allow the master to then send it state information for its GPIO pins. In the past this wasn't a problem, because the master constantly told the slave what pins do what every time it polled the server. But now the master is much quieter, only telling the slave to do things when things change. But when the slave resets, it loses all the state info about its pins. The master still communicates with the slave regularly (though much more infrequently) every time it "pets" the slave's "watchdog" function. And when it does that, I've added a provision to the handshake where the slave tells the master what values its millis() function produces. That is the number of milliseconds since the slave booted. And, since the master keeps a record of the slave millis from the last time this happened, it can note an unexpected drop in the number and then make a special transmission telling the slave what its pins should be doing. With the settings I have, this can allow the slave to get as much as 16 minutes out of sync. But that's acceptable to me, and should it not be for some reason, I can change the configuration to make the slave more responsive in such rare scenarios.
This evening while Gretchen was off at the Sunday evening pilates class in Glenford, I made a big pot of vegetable soup. We didn't have a lot of vegetables on hand, so, in addition to onions, beans, mushrooms, potatoes (all of which I like), and carrots (which I only just tolerate), I shredded some red cabbage. With the crushed tomatoes, the dye from the cabbage made everything a bit more purple than it would otherwise be. But it ended up being a successful soup, and Gretchen seemed to like it more than other soups I've made.
Later I took a bath, partly to soak the muscles that worked to bring back all that firewood. It had only been two backpack loads, but I'd had to carry it further and I'd had to do a lot more wrangling and splitting.
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