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Gretchen's fast new Badger
Thursday, April 11 2024
Today was a mostly rainy day, complete with the first thunder I'd heard since last summer. This afternoon Gretchen went off to a pilates class, her first ever, to see if she would like that. I think she's looking to expand her exercise regime. Later when she got home, she said she did like it, so maybe that will be a new one of her things.
Late in the afternoon I took the dogs for a walk, mostly because I knew there was a good chance Neville would go. It was actually raining lightly at the time, but he went anyway. Usually he's a bit of a pussy when it comes to rain. We walked south along the escarpment west of the Farm Road and then down across the wetlands to the Farm Road, and of course I managed to step in at least two puddles while wearing Crocs. The spring peepers were enjoying the warmer weather, though they weren't as loud as they'd been back in early March.
For the past week or so, I've been trying to work out the kinks in a "new" computer I set up for Gretchen to replace Badger, her old Celeron J1900 based computer (which probably dates to around 2015). The new computer is based on an Intel i7 3770, which is a ten year old processor but runs about five times faster than the old one and has a huge 32 GB of RAM. It's a louder machine (the old one was nearly silent), but Gretchen likes how snappy it is. The only major problem with it is that I can't get it to stay asleep. Something always wakes it up, and I keep expanding the number of devices not allowed to wake the computer. But now it's waking up without anything being logged in the history of things that woke it up (revealed by running powercfg /lastwake). So I might have to start disabling hardware. In the meantime, the only sure way to make it sleep is with hibernate. I have no idea why this stuff has to be so fucking difficult. What do people who are not computer professionals do?
This evening before bed, I made a few tentative steps towards building out a local web server on my NodeMCU-based remote control controller. What I want to be able to do is to reach it across the local network even when the internet is down to turn things on or off from some little control panel that is also on the local network. That would then put the NodeMCU into a mode where it becomes the canonical source for the state of its pins, transmits updates to the server it usually uses as its source of truth, and then the devices are turned on or off accordingly. Such functionality would be important so someone like Gretchen could easily turn devices on and off without having to log into a web page that might not even be reachable.
It turns out that it's pretty easy to write code to support such a web interface on a NodeMCU (I'm using examples at circuits4you.com), so I have a feeling I'll have something ready to push to my GitHub repository in a couple days. Then I have to do the work of building the frontend controller device. Knowing me, it will probably end up extremely generic and general-purpose.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240411 feedback
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