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television too painful to watch Thursday, June 27 2024
I continued my work with LoRa technology today. Fairly early in the day, I realized something remarkable: it was possible for a LilyGo TTGO TBeam designed to broadcast at 433 MHz to be programmed to communicate at 915 MHz. Not only that, but broadcasts made at 433 MHz on a TBeam could be picked up (often imperfectly) by another TBeam programmed to operate at 915 MHz. This was the opposite of the issue I'd noted yesterday, where devices from different manufacturers couldn't communicate even on the same frequency. It was looking like devices from the same manufacturer could communicate even when they were set at different frequencies. I didn't delve into why this was; I suspect that somehow they were actually communicating at the same frequency and that there was either a bug in my code or in the hardware that made this possible.
Later in the day, I was delighted to see that one of the TBeams was finally transmitting valid GPS information. It had taken it some time sitting out under the open sky transmitting nothing but zeros. But then something switched and it demonstrated that its GPS functionality works, though not for anyone in a hurry.
Later in the day, after using continuity tests to try to figure out the wiring of various other LoRa boards I'd bought, I finally got a Dragino Arduino shield working as a LoRa receiver in the 915 MHz band. This marked the first instance I'd seen of interoperability between LoRa devices from different manufacturers. I was so excited by it that I took one of the working TBeams (one that was accurately transmitting GPS data) to the end of the Farm Road to see if I could pick up its signal from the laboratory (a half mile to the north). Unfortunately, I could not.
What makes these experiments difficult is the poor quality of documentation for the hardware. I'm generally forced to perform continuity tests to see how the LoRa module is wired to the microcontroller. But those don't always work, since sometimes there are mysterious integrated circuits between the devices (perhaps to perform level-shifting), and, given the tiny and often blurred lettering on these mystery circuits, it's impossible to know what input connects to what output. Part of the problem is that I became interested in LoRa when it was still in the initial hype stage, and it seems I'd bought a number of devices that might never have worked to begin with. (It's easy for a Chinese seller to slap something half-assed together and sell it to a gullible American trying to get up to speed with a cutting-edge technology.)
This evening Gretchen wanted to watch the first Joe Biden versus Donald Trump debate of the presidential campaign season, and she naturally thought I would want to watch too. Sometimes I'm interested in doing this, though often I'm happier reading digests of what happened. In any case, at 9:00pm Gretchen found the debate on Roku (since we don't have conventional television) and we began to watch. I cracked open a beer, since I pretty sure I was going to need one.
As Biden shambled out onto the stage, Gretchen noted how sickly he looked and "how much work" he's had (presumably plastic surgery). His skin was pasty and taught and his steps seemed unusually deliberate. Trump, by contrast, waddled out with his fake tan looking obese but otherwise "healthy." The debate began without any handshaking or any real ceremony, with the moderators taking turns asking questions. The moment Biden spoke, I couldn't see how he was going to win this debate. He sounded hoarse and his voice rarely rose much above a whisper, and he kept having to stop to cough. Not only that, his mind didn't seem very sharp. He would let his sentences trail off and he'd stop periodically to think of the right thing to say, making for dreadful pauses. And then he'd talk, sometimes what he'd say would be garbled. Trump, but contrast, spoke forcefully and never seemed to need a moment's reflection. Nearly everything he said was a lie, but he spoke with conviction. We hadn't been watching the debate long when Gretchen said it was too painful and that she was going to go do something else. I stuck around a bit longer, and Biden did seem stronger and more alert later in the debate. But the damage, I assumed, had already been done. Biden's one good line that I can recall was accusing Trump of having the "morals of an alleycat."
I went to bed in a funk, assuming it was curtains for Biden. People would rather have an assertive conman than a befuddled old man with a cough. I also felt a little like I'd been misled by my pro-Biden news bubble (I'm looking at you, PalmerReport.com), which for years has been asserting that it's Donald Trump who is suffering from disqualifying cognitive decline, in addition to everything that makes him a horrible human and a disastrous president.
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