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ancient Arduino success
Monday, August 30 2021
Down in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, my brother Don hasn't been calling me at all for past few weeks, leading me to suspect he now gets everything he used to get from me from Google Assistant, who (unlike me) has endless patience when it comes to esoteric amphibians of the Paleozoic. Recently, though, Don left a message on our landline phone saying his phone was no longer working, that all it would do was show the stupid Cricket smiley face. Today when he called from my mother's landline (which is still working), I answered. He wanted my help with his phone, but he didn't actually have it on him. So I sent him to fetch it while I found a picture of what it looks like on the Cricket Wireless website. I had him hold down two different buttons for a long time, each time hoping the phone would restart. And it seemed to at one point. But all it would do was show that smiley face, which is a very bad reading of the room on a device that isn't usable. Fortunately, unlike when Don was using GreatCall, there is a Cricket retail store not too far away. Well, it's in Waynesboro, but it's not far from Books A Million, Don's favorite store. I told him to take his phone there and have them get it working again.
As I've mentioned, my Arduino-based solar controller uses a version of the Arduino IDE so is old that it cannot compile modern sketches, and old sketches cannot be compiled on newer versions of the IDE. A week or so ago, I migrated the sketch for the slave Arduino, the one controlling the LCD and the IR receiver (that is, the on-device user interface), but it failed to work, probably for some subtle reason related to advances in the Arduino environment. I don't really have the time to debug such issues, so it seemed prudent to get a version of the old IDE running somewhere. I decided not to do this on Woodchuck for fear it would poison its instance of the new Arduino IDE. So I set it up on Wolverine, my powerful AMD Ryzen 3600-based headless workstation (which I access exclusively through Remote Desktop). This was surprisingly easy, though I was unable to find a download of a sufficiently-old version of the Arduino IDE anywhere on the Internet and was forced to look through my old local Randomly Ever After directories (which I use to collect pretty much all the files I interact with in time-based piles, each a month in length), where I found Arduino 023. Once I had that installed, all I had to do with my old slaverman2.pde was change the IR codes and flash it to an Atmega328. When I tried this in the controller, I found it successfully provided a user interface once more (using a different IR remote) and that some of the numbers in its configuration were indeed preventing it from working correctly. There's still the matter of a failed zone valve, which I need to replace, but that's a messy job for another day.
Late in the workday, I had an unexplained feeling on the blahs that made me want to lie down in bed for a bit. It felt a little like a hangover, but I hadn't drunk enough yesterday for one of those. Perhaps it was the aggregate toll of several days of not-too-extreme drinking. Another weird symptom was phantom itches that kept appearing on my skin all over my body, as if I was being mildly attacked by some sort of tiny biting insect.
Gretchen returned from her bookstore shift in Woodstock with takeaway from the Garden Café, which included a veggie quesadilla for me. Instead of eating it in front of Jeopardy!, we watched two more episodes of The White Lotus, which keeps getting better.
We don't get HBO, so I had to download The White Lotus using bittorrent, and then we watch it using a fairly old media computer (one based on Celeron J1900 from 2013). The video (and sometimes even the audio) kept cutting out for fractions of a section, making the screen entirely black for an instant. It was annoying, but didn't completely ruin the experience. I wondered if perhaps the old J1900 was too weak to handle modern HD video formats (or the compression schemes used to cram them into reasonably-sized files). But then, on Gretchen's suggestion, I disconnected and reconnected the ethernet cable, the problems largely went away. And when I completely replaced that cable (connecting it to WalkingStick, a wireless router), the video was perfect. I hadn't realized marginal cables could have such a profound effect when playing a file hosted on a network drive.
With regard to the Celeron J1900, that's a very powerful processor from its time, and yet it only uses 10 watts of electricity. Based on its specs, it's unlikely I will ever need anything more powerful for playing media files (unless immersive virtual reality becomes an essential part of passive media consumption).
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