The end is nigh!
I intended to wake up fairly early this morning. But after a difficult night I decided to hell with that and doomscrolled for far too long looking at things, none of which I remember.
Eventually I got up. Sorted out stuff for work. My backpack is ready. So is my nice and clean thermos. The clothes I'm going to be wearing tomorrow, hung up ready. It's almost as if I'm organised. That can't be right...?
I mean, I even tidied my browser!
No. Comment.
Satellite woes
I came into the living room to see the satellite receiver faintly winking its green LED. Unplugging it and plugging it back in again showed it to be lifeless. I'm guessing the heat probably toasted the replacement capacitor, which had been pulled from something else so wasn't exactly used but was old and had been in something else. I have ordered a pack of 1000µF 16V Low ESR capacitors from Amazon, ought to be here by Wednesday, so when they come I can swap it over and see if that's what it needed or if something else is cooked.
Given my dehumidifier was off, there will have been a brownout this morning. Hmm, haven't had one for a while. But, alas, a power glitch is enough to upset some things. That's why I have the Livebox running via a battery pack, it will take over if the mains drops out. Otherwise every power glitch will mean a long (like 3-4 minute) restart.
The backup box is in place for the time being.
Letterbox
I also decided to have a look at fixing my letterbox system to deal with the glitching. Hooking an oscilloscope to the input pin shows it to be rather noisy.
When logic signals meet messy reality.
I don't have a pull-up on that pin other than the one in the ESP32 itself, however adding a resistor didn't seem to make much difference - recall that the wire is normally grounded and goes high when one of the switches is open.
Maybe a capacitor might help? I don't know. But what I do know is that the input arrangement, fed via a 1Kohm in-line resistor, has survived a number of thunderstorms so far, so I'll work with the board the way it is.
The "solution" is to note when the switch closes. Then wait a quarter of a second and read it again. If it reads closed a second time, then it is really closed.
Unfortunately, the firmware in the current (version 3.something) API is more advanced than the ancient (version 1.something) in the tool chain that I was using on my phone. So the GPIO12 that I had been using caused the device to freak out and report task_wdt: esp_task_wdt_reset(707): task not found because that pin now tells the firmware whether to run the flash at the default 3.3V or switch down to 1.8V. Devices that want 3.3V don't tend to work well at half that.
So I tried the next pin (GPIO15). But, nope, that's a strapping pin that controls boot. The next pin along (GPIO14) does appear to work except one cannot communicate with the device to flash it despite serial comms appearing to work.
For completeness, GPIO2 (the next pin) is also a strapping that controls boot mode, and the final pin (GPIO4) is also hooked to the bright white LED.
On the other side, only GPIO16 appears to be available, but it is used as the Chip Select to wake up the PSRAM so while the device will boot, the moment you try to do something with the LED on GPIO16, it'll blow up and core dump.
I really don't know why they bothered to track out GPIO16 (PSRAM), GPIO12 (1.8V flash), and GPIO4 (the white LED). Looking at the schematic, I think the truth is that the side of the device that has the 5V supply (and not the serial pins) contains all of the pins necessary to implement an SD interface (D0-D3, CMD, CLK, and ground) so maybe the idea was to allow the interface SD slot to be replaced by one on flying leads, or something? I don't know.
Given the distinct lack of available I/O on the ESP32-Cam device, since most of the I/O is taken up with the camera interface, I am using GPIO14, which apparently briefly outputs a PWM signal at boot? I've not noticed, but something I have noticed that doesn't seem to be documented anywhere is that having GPIO14 wired to provide power to an LED, while the serial monitor will show the device booting into download mode, the flash tool just won't connect. Unplugging it during the flashing and everything is okay.
Before anybody says anything like "Just use a regular EPS32 board!", I'll say again that I'm recycling an ESP32-Cam because I have a few of them.
The final thing I did was to add a state flag for whether or not the letterbox has been opened. If it has, and the door is closed, the red LED will blink. This can be reset by either reading the state in the browser, or by pressing a button hooked to GPIO0 (this doubles up as the button to engage programming mode).
I'll need to leave it for this week to give it a proper test, then I'll know if it is behaving correctly. Still, it's nice to put together a little bit of code to "scratch an itch" and create a solution to a problem that I had - namely, "Do I have post?".
And also...
I mopped the floor. Well, I vacuumed it and then mopped it. A warm breeze was blowing through so it didn't take long to dry.
Oh, and I tidied my browser as it was getting somewhat slow.
⚠ Caution: Wet floor. ⚠
I have also packed the metal pieces for the bench into the barn, and - sadly - put the padlock in place.
I have two melons. Actually, the melons are quite floriferous, but having taken so long to think about flowering, I suspect they are way too late to actually produce viable melons. Apparently it's supposed to take from 2-3 months for the plants to mature and make fruit. Well, most of them took that long just sitting in the ground thnking about it. It's coming towards the end of August! This is late. Anyway, I have two that are small but, maybe, will grow to be a good melon before something nibbles on them?
One of two small melons-to-be.
My sweetcorn is tiny, like knee-height, however there is corn coming. Normal harvest is from now to mid September, so I'll need to keep an eye on it.
Aw shucks...
And to write this, since it is pleasant (27°C) and breezy, I am sitting outside in the shade. My battery has done well, all of the time programming the ESP32, and now with me out here. Maybe six or seven hours? I'll need to go and plug in soon. But, then, I need to eat, wash the dishes, bag up the recycling for tomorrow morning, and... wind down slowly for an earlyish night.
I'm down to 20%, so time to upload this and plug it in to charge, walk/feed Anna, and then all of the stuff I mentioned just above.
Well, it was a quiet holiday. A bit on the "oh my god it's hot!" side, but I guess for most people that's better than endless rain.
Barn swallows
I've just realised, it's quiet. Too quiet. I don't see any barn swallows. I think they have gone. 😭
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| jgh, 25th August 2025, 00:14 |
Must be something about Britons and August Bank Holiday. I vacuuuumed the stairs and hall, and squirt&floor-clothed the kitchen floor yesterday. I even cleaned the bicycle scuff marks from the wall!
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| naitsabes, 28th August 2025, 15:39 |
1822 ... that's a HUGE mass ... never came to such a point with sooo many opened tabs, but >1000 I also had sometimes. 12 or probably 15 would make a good number ... one that one person can handle in a meaningful way. |
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Have you noticed the watermarks on pictures?
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- entry 2025/08/24
