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debugging an ESP8266 serial parser
Saturday, May 9 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
As predicted in the weather forecast, the day was a rainy one, the kind that leads to terms like "cabin fever." I, of course, had plenty to engrossing work planned for indoors, and even took 150 mg of pseudoephedrine to help me through it. I ended up spending much of the day down in the basement trying to make sense of my parser logs. I soon discovered that an integer I was supposed to be incrementing to know how many parser structures to apply was not being incremented because the variable being incremented was a local one, not the global one. Then, once I'd resolved that issue, I discovered that the parser structures being built before the parsing could begin (using strings of information stored in a file in the LittleFS file system) were junked up, causing the parser to repeatedly look for things that did not exist. Once I'd trimmed away carriage returns attached to integers, though, the parser structures looked valid. At that point, the only thing holding back my parser was the clunky way it parsed. It needed to parse multiple lines in squence to avoid being overwhelmed by data from the SolArk inverter, but it was only parsing one per loop (each of which took about 30 milliseconds). Once I'd fixed that problem and turned off parser logging, the parser started finding data. I didn't check to see if that data was correct, but I figured if it wasn't, I could easily fix it remotely by making adjustments to the configuration strings fed into the parser.
Meanwhile, Gretchen finished the book she'd been reading and didn't feel like starting her next book. At some point this afternoon she complained about the weather and said she wanted to go home. But then she found a big jigsaw puzzle and dumped out the pieces on our kitchen table and started working on it, starting (as people do) with the edge pieces. It's the kind of meaningless task that just sucks you in. Even I got sucked in a few times when I stood there looking at the pieces. Gretchen doesn't usually listen to music, since it distracts from most of what she would be doing (except cooking). But it evidently didn't distract from the puzzle, so she was listening to her Spotify playlist. It's rich in Joni Mitchell songs, and I've decided I like that stuff. I never liked the more popular Joni Mitchell songs, but the more obscure songs with their unexpected (possibly due to their obscurity) melodic twists are amazing.
Today was the 23rd anniversary of Gretchen and me getting married, and I felt a little bad spending so much time down in the basement debugging my serial parser while Gretchen, desperate for something to do, tried to solve a jigsaw puzzle. At some point I came up from the basement and realized the rain had stopped and Gretchen had taken Charlotte for a walk in the fog, which was grower thicker by the minute. So I went out thinking I'd find them at the lake. But they were just then returning from a hike up to the nearby radio tower. Gretchen and Charlotte (and, for the first time, this weekend, Neville) joined me for a walk down to the lake. The fog was too thick to see more than several dozen feet out into the water and it was cold as well, so we were only there for a few minutes.
Later this evening, I ran into, for the first time, device storage limits on my ESP8266s. It happened when I experimented with over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates, which hadn't worked reliably at the cabin in the past. These errors caused me to think more about options in the Flash Size menu of the Arduino IDE. Once I found one that worked better (one that allocatted one megabyte for LittleFS and 1019 kilobytes for OTA), not only did OTA work, but I could download massive files onto the ESP8266. And once I could do that, I could even reflash it using a file hosted locally, which is a much safer option than trying to do it with a file hosted off on the internet.
Fog on Woodworth Lake this evening. Click to enlarge.
Looking back at the shore from the dog through the fog. That piece of driftwood from last weekend is still on the dock. Click to enlarge.
Neville walking back to the cabin on the old dock path. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?260509 feedback
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