Rick's b.log - entry 2024/11/05

November 5th

AI-generated image.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November
The Tories that gave us all squat
I see no reason those lying bastards
Should ever be forgot.

Yes, it's the night British people celebrate the one man who walked into Westminster with honourable intentions. Unfortunately he wasn't successful, and more unfortunately I don't imagine much would have changed even if he had been. They're all as bad as each other.
And what makes it doubly funny is that this is the day the United States chooses whether to be led by a progressive Democrat (and, finally, a woman in power) or... well... it was mind-numbing enough to have somebody of Trump's stature being President once. But twice? And, even worse, it's apparently so close that nobody is willing to call it. What the hell, America!? Give the keys to The White House to, oh, I don't know, Adam Sandler?

PS: If you think electing a comedian as President would be a dumb idea, Ukraine would like a word with you.

ESP32Cam woes

I changed to the ArduinoDroid app. Now this looks quite nice. It compiles really quickly, like the sort of speed I'd expect from the DDE compiler, not taking forever and a day. Unfortunately it took several attempts before I was able to create a firmware that actually started. Specifying the AI-Thinker ESP32Cam board didn't want to work. I specified the Wrover module, gave it a Huge App configuation, and then went back to the AI-Thinker. This is probably an app quirk.

What's more important is that the code didn't work. It seems that more recent versions of the ESP32 IDE contain numerous changes that are not compatible with the older code. This is something I really appreciate with modern programming systems - the complete lack of backwards compatibility.

Now we come to the next, and currently insurmountable, problem. It reports the following:
[E][camera.c:1049] camera_probe(): Detected camera not supported.
[E][camera.c:1249] Camera probe failed with error 0x20004

I tried the settings for the Wrover board, the AI-Thinker board, and the ones hardwired into my LapseCam code. Guess what - nothing worked.

Now, there could be a fault with the board, but given that I made my enhanced camera with one and the LapseCam with the second, it doesn't make sense that the third just fails. I swapped the camera modules around. The older code/camera boots just fine with any of the three camera modules.

I'm not prepared to flash, and potentially break, a working device with firmware that doesn't want to work correctly.

My Sunday Project #1

Scanning negatives the not-so-easy way.

With the ESP32's bog standard camera, if I can get it to focus down that close and provide some sort of useful result, it ought to give a better resolution and be contactable from a browser, not needing to have some special sort of app that can talk to USB Video devices. Much better. There's a button on top of the scanner (which doesn't seem to do anything). Maybe wire that up to a GPIO for a "save JPEG to SD card" option? Though, to be honest, it's better to see the image first to be certain it's in the right place!

Some of the images are a weird half frame that was created by a Yashica Samurai. That camera, Google it, was a 35mm SLR that looked for all the world like some sort of weird 8mm HandyCam. It didn't look like a still frame camera. But with the ability to get over 70 shots on a single roll of film, autofocus, vivid photos, a lens that can take filters, and a reasonably capable zoom, mom was convinced to leave her Pentax SLR and lenses (including a foot-long zoom) behind when doing "holiday" stuff.

Half frame negatives, inverted and colour corrected.

Here's that as a captured image. It's square, because due to the clipping this was the most useful photo size to work with. It wasn't quite able to be 4:3 without zooming up, so I just stuck with square and, well, too bad for whatever was on the left and right. You see the problem, yes?

Mom in a donkey cart.

And here's mom again. I think these were both 1987 or 1988 and possibly Mallorca.

Mom reading the paper.

Mom preferred to take the path less travelled, so when the boat (the Canberra) would stop some place, she'd let the rowdy tour group go and do tour group things while she amused herself in the shops and back streets. Being fluent in Spanish helped, of course. She also learned some basic Greek both to ask for things and to read the signs. I don't think she ever got the hang of Italian pronunciation, so when she was in Trieste, she talked to the Yugoslavian taxi driver in German as that was the only language he and mom had in common. And not just that, very peculiar German because, well, Amish Auntie or something. Yes, Amish, as in Witness. ☺

My Sunday Project #2

Anyway, the kitchen is still a "work in progress" as far as tidying up goes. I do little bits here and there as I know my brain would get bored if I tried to tackle it all at once.

The corner of the countertops was piled up with stuff that I had sorted out to keep, to do something with. Well, that was several months ago on my summer holiday. And it was all still sitting there. So I took pretty much everything except the teapots and put it into boxes and into the 'cave', the closest thing I have to a cellar. There it can wait until I find it again in another twenty years.
Oh, f**k, I'll be seventy then.
Well, good news, I'll have retired. Not so good news, I expect I'll either be gaga or dead. Or, worse, both. Grrr-aargh.

Anyway, all of that stuff shifted, I cleaned the work surface and the tiles behind with a bleach water solution, and then started to put there what I wanted.

The kitchen corner.

As it is coming on to winter, I have to start thinking about winter fare. Which means home-made bread, stews, that sort of thing. You can see behind my assortment of pasta is nicely organised and labelled. So when I feel like farfalle (bow-tie), second tall jar from the left. And, well, I felt like a big pile of farfalle recently, which is why the jar looks depleted. It's okay, I have a box in my larder to top it up with.

I also put the induction cooker here so there was some place to keep it, rather than in front of the microwave where I normally cook. I will not be cooking here, as if it's meat or something then grease splatter goes everywhere. But for having someplace to put it, it's as good as any.

What I don't have is a convenient power point. I ought to be able to tap into the three-phase socket under the drainer to pick up on the third, remaining, phase. But, alas, technical problem...

No power on phase three.

My Linky tells me that phase three habitually has nothing drawing power. Something did, drawing 342VA. Perhaps the big gas discharge lamp at the end of the barn? It certainly doesn't appear to be used otherwise in the house wiring.
So I'll need to, at some stage, go up into the loft (oh, joy!) and try to work out where that wire runs in order to probe to see if it's a blown fuse or loose connection or what.

Which means I have to make sense of crap like this.

Scary wiring.

Remember I said, when I was installing the LED light in the back kitchen... no, you probably don't remember, so here's a reminder... the light was wired up between the blue and the yellow/green with the black left unconnected. Now go back and look at that picture just above and see if you can tell me what's what there? Hint - there are three lives, one neutral, and an earth. You can see five connections - four in the box and one added to make up the necessary five. And as for wire colours? Well, "whatever" seems appropriate.

From there, it goes to this.

Marginally less scary wiring
(but I haven't opened it)

Though, to be honest, I'll probe the exposed terminals in the upper picture first. If I get three at 230V then I'll know that the problem is afterwards, otherwise it's before (or, indeed, there).

Then, when that is all sorted, I can add another extension lead to the three phase plug to run the bread maker and/or slow cooker.

Your comments:

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Zerosquare, 5th November 2024, 23:11

In addition to being cropped, the scanned pictures look like agressive JPEG compression has been used. Are they post-processed for the blog, or do they really look like that?    If you plan on fixing your wiring, consider using Wago 221 connectors to join the wires. They're more expensive than regular screw terminal blocks, but are easier to work with, and there's no risk of eventual loose wires.

A tree-dwelling mammal, 6th November 2024, 17:28

As a qualified sparky, looking at those electrics hurts my eyes. Not sure if it's "the French way of doing things" or "a really old building that was wired before the French equivalent of Part P came into force"?    Scanning negatives... that takes me back.    I used to use a Canon FS2710, originally via TWAIN on the RiscPC then latterly via sane on *nix (actually NetBSD). Both of them had "issues".    The RISC OS TWAIN software was unable to scan a full frame at 2700dpi. If you selected an area to scan then you could do it at 2700dpi, but to scan the entire frame (slide or negative) you had to drop to 1300dpi. Otherwise you'd end up with an abort. (I know DP reads these comments, sorry, I can't remember exactly what the error message was.) Seemed to be related to the scanned image exceeding a certain file size.    Using sane on a unix box I could scan the whole image at 2700dpi, but it didn't support the automatic colour correction on the FS2710 (I believe it used the command set for the earlier FS2700 scanner). The only way I could get it to work reliably was to scan the entire image as a positive, save as a TIFF, then jump onto the Windows XP box next to the unix workstation, load the TIFF into Photoshop (CS2 I think at the time, may even have still been CS1), invert the colours then apply automatic colour correction, levels, curves etc. After which I then had to painstakingly airbrush out all of the dust, dirt and scratches.    Why not connect the scanner to the Windows machine directly? Because it used a SCSI-2 interface, and by the time XP came out SCSI had gone beyond merely sacrificing goats. The last version of Windows to officially support SCSI was Windows 2000.    At one point you could get a USB-SCSI interface, but by the time I realised I needed one of these they had become unobtainium.    All of this means that my expensive film scanner (purchased around 2000-2001) is now an expensive paperweight.    My flatbed scanner (Epson V350) will scan slides and negatives, and doesn't do too bad a job. Not as good as the Canon, but much better than these el-cheapo units from China. Unfortunately version 2H23 of Windows 11 appears to have bricked this as well. Last official supported version of Windows was Win10. It used to work on Windows 11 (with the Windows 10 drivers), but now, it just sort of doesn't.

jgh, 6th November 2024, 21:28

In my current job surveying sites for a certain public sector non-vertical replacement program (ahem!) if I'd been doing them as an electrical installation report I'd be failing them. I can hear the ghost of my E&E lecturer screaming in dispair.

Rick, 6th November 2024, 23:06

Zerosquare:  The pictures were captured using a webcam app, processed using the Photos app, and then uploaded here that scales to 680px width at 90% (or is it 95%? I forget) quality.  The crappiness was how it came from the device. It's shocking, really, how it manages to make such a low resolution look fuzzy, but then I'm just going to go out on a limb here and guess that this thing might have some painfully limited amount of memory onboard. It's an SPCA2080 sending MJPEGs (4:2:2), so not impressive.    Tree rodent:  I don't think there's any excuse for using the EARTH as a current carrier other than "slap it up, it's good enough". Even if the dude was colourblind, it's two different colours for a reason. That being said, maybe the lamp was fitted after the consumption of home brewed? 😂  Doesn't hurt my eyes but it sure as hell hurts my brain. That and when I see the three phase cable that's black, red, red, and red...and I can't trust the colours to mean *anything*.  If I had money I'd rewire everything to make sense *and* be logically consistent. Maybe the harsh "Thou shalt not" regulations came in because people were wiring stuff like this, which proved lethal to those who followed and, you know, didn't expect the earth to be the live!    Airbrushing blemishes, a potential use for an AI?    jgh:  "non-vertical  replacement program" - what the hell does that even mean? You can just say Jenga, you know...

David Pilling, 6th November 2024, 23:44

Sorry for the Canon FS problems. Lack of memory somewhere(?). No one mentioned such problems at the time (30 years ago). As you say these days flatbed scanners will do a decent job.    By now squillions of electronic cameras must have been made. Really just find a good one and set it up to cover the negative. For some reason they keep churning out the low res. not very useful cameras.    Inspired by Rick I recently got an ESP32 Cam, compiled code with no problem, but not camera code, using it for something else - because it had external aerial.

A tree-dwelling mammal, 7th November 2024, 08:54

DP - I was running it on a RiscPC with 130MB RAM (2x 64MB SIMM plus 2MB VRAM). I have a vague recollection that it would throw an "abort on data transfer" if the scanned image was more than around 25MB in size. May have had something to do with the 26-bit address space. Bearing in mind that this thing was scanning at 2700dpi optical resolution, so a full-frame 35mm scan could be pretty huge.    I believe I still have a working Adaptec SCSI card somewhere. Might be worth me setting up an older PC with Windows 2000 (I still have an OEM CD-ROM) just for scanning slides and negatives. The Epson V350 does a decent job, but nowhere near as good as the Canon.    I also had an Epson GT-7000 (I think?) which worked perfectly with the Epson TWAIN drivers. Amazingly no goats needed sacrificing even with two scanners, two SCSI hard drives, a CD-ROM drive and a CD-RW drive all on the same SCSI bus. (I have a photo of that setup somewhere, a 4-slice RPC with everything filled up.)    Rick - if you still lived in the UK and had an installation like that I'd rewire it for you for the cost of the materials (by which I mean "order the following from Screwfix, and get some pizza delivered at some point during the day"). I don't really want to see anyone get killed to death. Unfortunately France is a bit far for me, especially as my passport expired some time ago and I've never bothered renewing it.    Mind you, in the UK they're a bit stricter on wiring codes these days (Part P of the Building Regulations). If it's in a dangerous condition the installation can be condemned.

jgh, 7th November 2024, 17:27

What's not vertical?  What's a big public sector IT programme with huge problems going back decades?  ;)

David Pilling, 8th November 2024, 02:05

ATDM - something like did the scanning software have enough virtual memory setup. Quite possibly I never tested at >25MB for then that was a lot of memory. It's too late baby, it's too late. We're not going to fix the bug at this point - not got the hardware. Got the source code, presumably could look at the code and find the bug as some sort of futile gesture.

David Pilling, 14th November 2024, 01:45

Best DIY 35mm SLIDE & FILM Copier--Easy, Low Cost ver 2.0 (4K)    on You Tube may be of interest. DIY film scanner.

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