|
|
bifurcation loop Sunday, June 30 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Today promised to be both warmer and sunnier, so I knew I'd be taking the dogs for a good hike. First, though, I wanted to capitalize on the SolArk serial data interception I'd figured out yesterday and use it to replace the SolArk cloud as a source of energy data in my remote-control/automation system. Doing so would mean I could theoretically perform all the calculations necessary for cabin automation without even needing a working connection to the internet. And what data did make it to the internet was much more granular (with an update every ten to twenty seconds rather than every six hundred seconds) and fresh.
I'd done some thinking about how I wanted my ESP-8266 board to interact with my remote-control ecosystem. Ideally, it would be just another device, though one not specializing in collecting weather data or performing remote control. So the plan was to more or less assemble its code from scratch, borrowing heavily from the working code of my other ESP8266 devices. As with my other devices, I made it so this one also served a web page (a simple one just showing a *-delimited string of important inverter values) and also send the data via a web request to my web server. (To handle this new data, I added a new endpoint to my data.php backend processor.) With a few little tweaks to the plumbing, I'd replaced the SolArk cloud with this newer, better source of data.
Using an online text difference highlighter, I found what looked like a likely generator power value in a set of four hexadecimal digits in the SolArk data packet I'd been poring over for over a week. To do this, I captured one packet with the generator off, and then turned on the generator and captured another packet. These four digits were about 500 characters earlier in the data packet, which was a little suspicious, but they consistently translated to a decimal value very close to the one being reported on the SolArk cloud website. (Such live values are never exactly what one sees on the SolArk cloud website, since they are much more granular and tend to jitter around somewhere near the displayed SolArk cloud value.)
With all that working fairly well, I took the dogs for a walk first down East Bifurcation Creek, west on Virginia Creek all the way to the West Bifurcation, and then back to the bifurcation point via the boulder-strewn West Bifurcation Creek. Along the way, I logged my journey with CalTopo so I could get a sense of how different these creeks were on the ground than they were on maps. In so doing, I discovered that the location where the Woodworth Lake Outflow Creek is shown to run is a occupied by a large rocky forested island with no running water at all. The two bifurcation creeks that carry the water run as far as 400 meters (1300 feet) from each other, with the east one following a mostly-straight line that coincides with the boundary between two different kinds of gneiss on the geological map overlay. The west one heads almost due west from the bifurcation and then turns northeastward, where it seems to meet up with Virginia Creek somewhere in the Six Acre Marsh (though I haven't confirmed this).
Back at the cabin, I did some more tinkering with my new inverter data source and then spent some time hand sanding my second rustic stool, which I intend to mostly use in the upstairs loft and perhaps as place upon wich to set things when I am taking a bath. I also made an attempt to eat more of the leftover Gretchen had packed for me on Friday. These included some delicious overcooked collard greens. I had them with some leftover rice I'd made last night and Indian spicy pickle, and it was a winning combination. I then had Neville do what he could to clean out the rice stuck to the bottom of the InstantPot as I went about the usual pre-departure ritual of cleaning up the cabin.
I started the drive for home at about 4:20, delayed a little waiting for Charlotte to get back from one of her prowls. Our friend Ray was having a 57th birthday party at his house starting at 5:00pm, and it was looking like I was going to fashionably almost two hours late.
I've become so comfortable with driving the scenic route that I now routinely pass cars that seem to be going slower than I want to go. Today I made a special effort not to get stuck behind slow cars on Route 32 south of the Big Belly Deli (such cars always overuse their brakes on the big downhill grade east of the Citgo), so as I approached that intersection on Route 32, I blasted past one car and then another, a move that was disturbing for the driver of the second car that it braked as I passed it. The Chevy Bolt has amazing acceleration for pulling such stunts; it's not the kind of thing I'll be doing in the Subaru Forester.
The skies over the Adirondacks had been mostly clear, but as I entered the Catskills, the clouds grew gloomier and gloomier. For the last few miles of the drive, the skies opened up and drenched the world with rain. When I got home, there was an ongoing downpour and Neville didn't want to get out of the car. So Gretchen grabbed whatever it was we were taking to Ray's place, put it in the car, and I rode in the back with Charlotte while Gretchen drove and Neville remained in the front passenger seat. A vivid rainbow hovered before us at a close distance as we drove, its two pots of gold seeming to be in the ditches on either side of Wynkoop Road.
The rain was just about to end and there were a lot of people at Ray's place when we arrived, so we had to park in a way that blocked a good number of vehicles in. There was an interesting mix of mostly young people Ray knows from the restaurant where he works and us older people Ray has known for decades. In addition to our two dogs, there were four others: Jack, Sarah the Vegan's dog Buddy, a very social Boston terrier brought by one of Ray's younger restaurant friends, and Ray's brother Kim's little dog Hurricane. There was a fair amount of meat for all Ray's many meat-loving friends, though there was also plenty of good stuff for the likes of me: a cavatappi pasta salad, barbecued tofu on skewers, and something involving red cabbage. The featured drink contained tequila, and it was tequila with lime juice that I eventually settled on as my drink of choice. As much of that as I drank, I never actually got sloppy drunk. I had a fairly long conversation with Ray's brother Kim as I queried to see if his company(s) had an opening for a software developer. He works for an eccentric billionaire with lots of tech properties, so it seemed like an avenue worth exploring. I didn't really get a concrete action item from the conversation though. At some point Ray started a fire in the fire pit, and that was nice until the smoke got in my eyes. Later in his studio, I smoked some cannabis that didn't seem to have any effect. I hadn't even brought him a birthday present, but I guess he felt like owed me something for installing his minisplit and treating his dog Jack to a vacation in the Adirondacks when Ray and Nancy went to Fire Island, so he handed me an enormous colorful abstract painting. It was beautiful and looked like a more painterly take on Piet Mondrian. Gretchen had moved the car at some point, allowing us to stay at the party after most of the others had left. Jeff and Alana showed up even later than we had and were still there when we left.

A screengrab from CalTopo of my walks today. The purple line marks the State Park boundary, and most of the property to its south and east is our parcel. The white squiggle on the right traces the rough location of the East Bifurcation Creek (where I've pinned the East Bifurcation Falls). The whitish area in the top center is the Six Acre Marsh, which I mostly avoided, though otherwise I walked west from the mouth of the East Bifurcation Creek to the mouth of the West Bifurcation Creek via Virginia Creek. Note that the bending thin blue north-south line in the center doesn't actually mark any creek that exists in reality. The thick blue line marks a difference between two adjacent kinds of gneiss bedrock (I'd been calling all rock in the Adirondacks "granite," but the rock here is technically gneiss. The dark brown contour marks 1600 feet above sea level and the thinner contours are in increments of 40 feet. Click to enlarge.

A pool in the East Bifurcation Creek just before it plunges over the East Bifurcation Falls.
Click to enlarge.

The cliffs just east of the lower West Bifurcation Creek.
Click to enlarge.

Part of the jumble of large boulders along West Bifurcation Creek.
Click to enlarge.

The hacked SolArk dongle with the serial wires headed off to an ESP8266-based D1.
Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is: http://asecular.com/blog.php?240630 feedback previous | next |