Rick's b.log - entry 2025/01/26

Where's my bill, EDF?

My current reading is 10,125 kWh. My previous reading, according to the last bill, was 9,694 kWh. That's 431 kWh over the past two months, which is enormous (I typically use ~120-140kWh a month), but it's a combination of a brutal cold spell so I have had some heat on, even if most visitors would find ~8°C to be insufferably cold, plus my car has needed a lot more charging as the battery performance is pretty awful in the cold. When it was -4°C out, I used as much battery getting into the village about 4km away as I would normally use to get to work, and getting to work used as much as going to Big Town twice as far away when it was only a little bit warmer, such as the Saturday before Christmas.

If I assume a price of around €0,35/kWh, then this bill ought to cost me €150 - which is a lot for me - but, of course, I need to factor in extra heating (even if it's a Lidl oil radiator, it's €0,35 per hour, it adds up) and I'm not paying around 4 × €18 (*) or €72 on diesel, so...

* - That's based upon what I used to pay for Caoimhe back in 2023/2024. I've not paid any attention to pump prices as, being electric, it's no longer of concern to me.
A quick look online, it looks like it's €1,699/litre which is on the highish side of normal. And SP98? FFS, it's €1,829/litre. That's what I put in the garden tools as the things are old and likely wouldn't cope will with the 10% bioethanol that's in 95 octane petrol. SP98 is nominally 5% ethanol, but here in France it's usually ETBE instead of straight ethanol (better for the environment, slightly less corrosive).

You know the amusing thing? I'm a little cold as I write this, so I put on a fuzzy wooly jumper and fired up the kettle for (yet) more tea. It is, however, the arse end of the year when it is cold and miserable, and the current amount of dampness just makes it feel worse.
Some people at work, the ones that don't burn wood, have radiators, heaters, they'll burn 5-6kW to heat their homes to a much more agreeable 18°C (or more). I spoke to somebody who said they put the heating on for all of the time they aren't out of the house or asleep. So, using me as an example (as I work the same hours, just a different time of day), so I get up at 7am and leave at 8.20am, let's call that an hour and a half for simplicity. I get home at 5.15pm and I'm up and about until about 10pm. Let's round the other way (half five) and call that four and a half hours. Which means six hours of approx 5kW at €0,35/hour is roughly a tenner a day on heating alone. Since these people wouldn't cope with the cold like I do, they probably think 5°C is perishing, so that's two long months at a tenner a day which is... four times my entire bill on heating alone. We can pretty much ignore "getting up to temperature" as she says her home is draughty and cold even though she's pouring money into heating.

I'm sorry, even though I could pay a bill like that, I simply cannot justify it. I could just be cold for a while in the winter, like the past fifty years of my life, and instead buy myself a pretty decent laptop. I won't, as I don't really see a use case for such a thing, but I could, because I didn't burn away money to warm up an enviroment that would just as soon lose that heat to the unforgiving cold outside.

She thinks I'm crazy, being cold. I think she's crazy, spending that on heating, especially a poorly insulated place. But, at the end of the day, it'll warm up eventually (we're fast approaching the end of January so not long now...) and I'll have around five hundred more in my savings due to not burning it away on momentary pleasures.
You know, if I find the cold sucks too much, I'll just make myself some comfort linguine and get into bed under the heated blanket. That's what I did last weekend when it was bitter out. I kept myself warm, life goes on, and for me it's a pleasant day when it's ~12°C out. ☺

Yet another flood

I didn't see this one myself, I was in bed watching something on Netflix as it as "still raining". However the security camera caught it.

Security camera showing flooding.

You can clearly see the water pouring down the driveway and over the grass (magenta arrow), the pond completely full (green arrow), and the drainage channel behind the house also full (blue arrow). This is, arguably, one of the worse times as it doesn't usually back up to the channel by the back of the house. But this time it rained medium hard forever.
The building itself didn't flood, that only happened because the drainage was blocked and the water had nowhere to go given the ground level is higher than the back, but here the water could pass under the drive...in either direction. ☺

Water, water everywhere.

I can't do much about the water pouring over the driveway. There's too much coming down from the fields for the piping to cope with. Fixing that would require demolishing all of that and putting in something with more capacity. I can imagine that would be costly.

As for the water backing up, it does, though normally not as far as the channel behind the house. If seems like that's going to be "a thing", I think I'll need to find a guy with a backhoe digger to see about making the outflow larger to carry the water... someplace else downstream (oh, look, the neighbour farmer's field, oh diddums).

More worrying though, is the sudden uptick in how often this is happening -> the two days of epic thunderstorms in June, Hurricane Kirk in October... and how we have back to back storms - Éowyn and Hermina. I'm not sure which brought all the rain yesterday evening, but guess what, even more rain is forecast, oh joy. Oh, and I have to take the rubbish up the lane sometime today. Spiffing. I think I'll leave the recycling until next time though, far too windy.

So... Is this going to be a weather anomaly, or is this The New Normal?

Glad to be rid of my HP 3630

Just because I can, here are the cartridges that I have been sent:

   2024/09/30   Black & Colour
   2024/06/25   Black
   2024/03/29   Colour
   2023/05/27   Colour
   2022/08/09   Black
   2022/06/05   Colour
   2022/01/30   Colour
   2021/10/10   Colour
   2021/07/26   Colour
   2020/11/25   Black & Colour
   2019/10/06   Colour
   2019/03/04   Black & Colour
   2018/10/08   Colour
   2017/11/20   Welcome kit (Black & Colour)

My HP4222e is taking over as the main inkjet. I did have a 100 pages/month plan. They offered three months free at 50 pages/month and, well, given my actual use, and that I can roll over unused pages to a degree (I think 150 max?) I see no reason to change that. So I'm paying €2 less a month.

I noticed, in the supermarket, that Epson has a similar scheme called ReadyPrint that offers similar functionality at similar prices. While I was extremely unimpressed with my XP-345, I might be open to the idea of looking to see if the supermarket has any sale specials on compatible Epson printers to see if it is in any way better than the HP offering.

Canon doesn't appear to have a similar plan except for a limited range of Pixma printers, and the supermarket doesn't sell Brother (I don't know if Brother does such a scheme, I just recall that my old Brother was the least fussy inkjet I've ever had).

Playing with the ESP32Cam

There aren't many GPIOs available on the ESP32Cam because most of them are taken by the camera module, and those that aren't are taken by the µSD card interface.

ESP32-Cam pinout.

As you can see, most of the GPIO are either used by the µSD and/or have specific boot-time requirements, namely (I think this is right):

While it says the GPIO16 is "safe to use", it is actually used to communicate with the PSRAM chip and it is really only able to be UART2 receive or something to do with accessing a flash chip. It isn't a regular GPIO so it's pretty useless for our needs.

Since we won't be using the SD card, this brings several proper GPIO pins into play. I have picked GPIO12 for controlling the LED as the LED is connected to Ground and 3.3V output here turns it on, which means it won't interfere with the need for it to be LOW at boot.
The switch is connected to GPIO13 as it has no particular restrictions.

This is what I have put together.

Programming the ESP32 board.

It's not so easy to see in the photo, so let's look at what's going on.

The USB serial interface provides the serial data in and out (white and green - lower left of the board as you see it) as well as the 5V and Ground power (red and black - upper right). Yes, it is being powered by my phone.
The dangling orange wire is for selecting the boot mode. I put it to Ground to enter download mode for reprogramming it.
The blue wire (lurking beside the power at the upper right) goes to the red LED by way of a 220 ohm resistor. The other side of the LED is grounded.
Finally, the switch. The orange wire comes from Ground and goes to the Common side of the switch. The black wire is connected to the Normally Open side of the switch, and that then goes to GPIO13 (next to the blue wire for the LED, upper right).

What happens is that the switch input is internally pulled up (to HIGH). When the switch is closed, this input is connected to ground (LOW). By doing this, a circuit to ground is made and as long as the switch (or switches) are all closed, the input will read LOW. As soon as the circuit is broken, either by a cable break or a switch being released, the input will read HIGH.
I have used a pull up and tie to ground because this means that there's only a ground wire and a sense wire lurking around. It would equally work to hook the switch to 3.3V and have the input pull down and then it'll be LOW when the circuit is broken (switch triggered), but this is a little less safe at it means a wire carrying 3.3V. If that were to come undone, say, and short to Ground, it could burn out the voltage regulator or other nasty things.

Therefore, while the switch is not pressed, the LED turns on to indicate the letterbox is open.
When the switch is pressed, the LED turns off to indicate the letterbox is closed.

Here is the code that makes this happen. At this time it is all very simple.

// Rick's letterbox - test code
// 2025/01/26 : Switch detection

#define LED    12
#define SWITCH 13

int switchstate = 0;
int laststate = LOW;

void setup()
{
    Serial.begin(115200);
    Serial.println();
    Serial.println("LED switch started (debounce test 2)");
    
    // Set up the LED
    pinMode(LED, OUTPUT);
    digitalWrite(LED, LOW); // off
    
    // Set up the switch - note pull UP
    pinMode(SWITCH, INPUT_PULLUP);
}

void loop()
{
    switchstate = digitalRead(SWITCH);
    if ( switchstate != laststate )
    {
        if ( switchstate == HIGH )
        {
            Serial.println("Letterbox open");
            digitalWrite(LED, HIGH); // On
        }
        else
        {
            Serial.println("Letterbox closed");
            digitalWrite(LED, LOW);  // Off
        }
        
        laststate = switchstate;
        
        // debounce delay
        delay(100);
    }
}

What I plan to do, at some point (though I'm not sure when), is expand this to be useful, as follows:

• Read the current time from an NTP server, so the device knows when things are happening.
• Note the state and time, store this to PSRAM (or Flash?) - probably loading/maintaining/writing a list of, say, the last eight or so events.
• Connect to WiFi and be ready to serve an itty bitty web page giving the current state and listing the most recent events (with dates and times).

Then, well, I think that's pretty much all I am looking for. Given another ESP32 in the room is doing realtime decoding of streaming AAC audio and showing all that's happening on an LCD panel, I think that using an ESP32 is massively overkill... but, well, I had one and it isn't that arduous getting it programmed, even if ArduinoStudio has bugs and seems to flash the first built code rather than the most recent unless I 'pretend' to change the board type and it rebuilds everything all over again. This means a rebuild takes about a minute and a quarter rather than ten seconds, but it's vastly better than the twenty minutes to half an hour that the Arduino IDE on my PC would take...for every freaking build. It's weird and strange writing code on a phone (!) but it's a much more pleasant experience in that it behaves kind of like you'd expect a compiler to. There's some crap thrown up on the screen, then it either says "done" or "you're a dummy". There's no waiting for-freaking-ever before anything seems to happen. So, yeah, it's much nicer doing it this way.
I ought to see if a Bluetooth keyboard works with the IDE, that might make things better, certainly for inputting code.

Now I have to get my bin sorted out. AccuWeather says it is still raining... It doesn't seem to be, but it probably will be by the time I'm ready. Lovely. Well, better get on to that, it's already dark. I should have done it earlier, but meh, this was more fun. ☺

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Rob, 27th January 2025, 18:45

The problem we had, with every epson printer we've owned, cheap or expensive, is they have fixed heads. Don't use it for a while, the ink dries up and the heads clog up, and you waste nearly an entire ink cartridge on cleaning cycles. Our only inkjet is now an HP 4100, also on instant ink, and it's been much more reliable. And if the heads do clog up, a new cartridge brings along new ones.    Apparently you can multiplex the gpio if you're clever, but needs switch as normally open. Stick the switch across the LED with a highish resistor. Output high to turn on led. Change to input mode, read it to see if switch is shorting it to low.    One thing I have here (though not working at the moment as dog chewed the cake) is an infra red beam switch across the front yard. LED on one side, sensor on other. It might be an interesting thing for you to put together and add to this. Could use a reflector rather than running wires to far side of path.

Rob, 27th January 2025, 18:47

.. Chewed the cable.. Damn autocorrupt. Though if there were cake left unattended I'm sure he'd chew on that too.

Rick, 27th January 2025, 19:25

Luckily I'm only running wires out the the post box just out front. ;)    But, yes, the same basic code could be attached to other input devices (IR, PIR, etc) to trigger.  The LED may not be retained, it's just there as a visual proof of working. I'll have it log the times the switch changes state and serve that up as a web page.    I'm only using the ESP32Cam because I have some around and because it has enough I/O for what I'm trying to do.    How does the HP's print compare to the Epson? My old Brother had an internal head, and it was happy to run off of anything, even a bunch of clone refills that cost a tenner.  The thing is, big chunky built in heads ought to be more advanced than the mass produced crap attached to cartridges. My Brother could do dots of different sizes, whereas I don't think the HP carts can, which means dithering is more noticeable in HP prints because it's not able to add "a touch of cyan", either there's a dot or there isn't.    I would suggest a reflector, as more wires means more potential points of failure.

Rick, 28th January 2025, 20:21

So I just went out to unplug my car.  Chucking down rain and blowing a gale.  What the hell? It's been doing that since Friday! Come on, give it a rest already.

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