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testing a 3D magnetic sensor
Sunday, May 24 2026
It was another unpleasantly cool, rainy day, but at least I managed to wake up without a hangover, which is an achievement when I've been taking recreational pseudoephedrine. I spent much of it working further at my ESP8266 Remote Control code, mostly working out issues with the transition between different output modes (particularly on either side of a reboot). Later in the day, I added support for the TMAG5273 3-axis magnetometer, which I will be using to measure the twisting magnetic field in the propane gauge at the Adirondack cabin. I didn't have a great field for logging the raw values from that sensor, which will have to be converted at some point to a percentage. But for the time being, I've decided to use the closest thing I do support (and which I have never yet used), the wind direction and wind speed fields, which I might some day make more generic by calling them "vector direction" and "vector magnitude."
When I went to test a TMAG5273, I was dismayed to see that none of my sensor data was being transmitted. Further digging showed that this was because my ESP8266 now thought it had offline-logged data in its FRAM to transmit. Not only that, but a code suggestion emphatically made by ChatGPT (and dutifully pushed by me) had eliminated an important line of code that flagged a logged record in the FRAM as having already been sent to the backend. So it kept transmitting and retransmitting the same record. Not only that, but the code doing this had never been properly tested and needed some fixes. Once I had all that squared away (as much as I cared to, that is), the TMAG5273 worked great. I've ordered some tiny surface-mount versions (they come in surface-mount six-pin packages that are smaller than a match head) and the hope is to cram one into the tiny void inside a RemoteReady clip, the kind pre-designed to fit directly over the rotating magnetic field of a RemoteReady propane gauge (the kind at the cabin).
At some point there was enough of a lull in the rain that I could attempt to take the dogs for a walk. Charlotte seemed reluctant at first, but then when Neville appeared behind her, she was happy to go. I took them down the Chamomile gorge on the remains of a trail mostly used by Crazy Dave and our mountain-biking neighbor Tommy. The connecting trail between the Gullies Trail and that trail crosses the Chamomile at a place where Crazy Dave (perhaps inspired by me) has erected a number of shoddy cairns and a substantial (if shoddy) stone wall. I impulsively decided to add my own cairn there, one that was very tall and narrow but fairly precarious. I then continued down the gorge a little ways, ultimately returning by walking up the bed of the creek itself. The bed was thick in places with moss and had steep stone embankments in places and was absolutely gorgeous.
Gretchen returned from the City in the late afternoon and told me all about her trip, which had included staying up talking with her friend Marissa until 2:00am. Then today she'd had lunch at Peace Foods with one of the higher-level organizers of the recent beagle rescue near Madison, Wisconsin.
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