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infrared witchcraft
Wednesday, December 4 2024
At noon today I drove over to the Downs Street brick mansion to meet Isaac, the guy from the roofing company who had re-roofed our house in Hurley and successfully fixed issues on the slate roof on Downs Street. Today we were meeting so he could look at the box gutters, which are leaking in places and causing the eaves to to rot and peel. Isaac had bought a little drone since the last time I'd seen him, and he decided to fly it around to get a look at the trouble spots. He said that there is a way for them to fill in the low spots in the sagging gutters with a rubbery material so they'll drain successfully, which is what I was thinking I might do back when I was thinking I might fix the problems myself. As we walked into the neighbor's driveway just northeast, a woman came out and she said she was the owner of that house. After I explained I'm the owner of the brick house, Isaac is a roofing guy, and we were there looking at the gutters of the brick house, Isaac asked if she wanted him to look at her roof. So he flew his drone over it and saw a missing shingle. The woman said she's owned the house for four years and showed us a beautiful outdoor stairway to the second floor she had just installed. She also showed me a massive rectangular stone with the letters "WFW" on it; it looked like it might've belonged to a stone building that had once been on the site.
On the way back home, I went out of my way so I could buy a few things at Home Depot including a 3/4-1/2-3/4 copper T-fitting (they cost more than $6 now!), a set of titanium drill bits that fit into an impact driver (to replace recent breakage), and a Monster Energy drink to help propel me through some drudgery this afternoon.
I hate form-based busy work, the kind of repetitive bullshit where you find yourself entering the same basic information over and over again. I never do it unless there is a mandate for me to do it, and what I produce is usually at least somewhat fraudulent. I find myself making up things to pad out the days in a calendar. This was definitely the case back when I used to work for Catalisgov.com, the sprawling private equity conglomerate that bought up the little mom & pop software development shop I worked for in Red Hook. At some point the assholes running the company mandated that we start logging the work we were doing in a form on third-party website designed for this. I typically procrastinated entering my data until the last second (I'm not sure how I knew when that was!), and then I'd typically just make shit up based on the project timelines in Jira, being sure to claim that I'd worked at least eight hours every day (though that was almost never the case). It's possible that the data I entered was later used to decide that I was someone who could be safely laid off, but if so, so be it. That was probably the worst thing about that job!
Today I found myself doing form-based busy work yet again, this time to satisfy the demands of New York State Unemployment, which I am now receiving for a second time. I was made to understand that I am supposed to be logging my job hunt in a web form, something I have not been doing. I've been applying for jobs, but the ordeal of also having to enter that data into a site hosted by the State of New York was definitely the sort of thing I have a tendency to procrastinate. But there's a second meeting coming up with an unemployment bureaucrat on Friday, and I needed to have my work search documented in those stupid web forms. So I buckled down and added all the recent jobs I'd applied for on LinkedIn.com using the emails that had been automatically generated as the basis for that data. The only things I lied about were the dates; I opted to spread them out across the past six weeks to make it look like my job hunt was steady and relentless instead of coming in a couple fifteen-minute bursts. For those looking to get a software development job, applying to jobs on LinkedIn appears to be a waste of time; nobody has gotten back to me for any of these jobs.
Once I'd gotten that long-procrastinated chore behind me, I could finally dedicated myself to something I very much wanted to be working on: building out infrared communication technology in my ESP8266 Remote Control system. My thinking is that the remote controllers are present in distant rooms with devices nearby that can be controlled by infrared remote, so why not be able to send arbitrary sequences of pulses to an infrared diode connected to a pin on the remote ESP8266? This would be particularly handy for controlling the behavior of the minisplits (once the ESP8266 powered them up of course).
The other day I'd built out the database support for sending such signals. I figured I would store the infrared control sequences in the database so that I could conjur them up like magic spells to be chanted by a remote infrared diode after triggering a "command." But first I would need to record those sequences.
The most interesting device to control would be the cabin minisplit, and I'd brought one of its remotes back to Hurley with me. I thought I would write an Arduino sketch to log infrared sequences on an ESP8266 and then save them into the new ir_pulse_sequence table I'd created in the database that serves as my system's source of truth and repository of logged data. First though, I needed to see what those sequences look like. I created a bare-bones Arduino sketch, pointed the minisplit remote at it, and hit the power button. What was logged, though, was chaos. The remote seemed to begin all its sequences with the same set of values, and the others were inconsistent, even when hitting the same button. There was no pattern to these sequences that I could identify. Concerned that perhaps the infrared receiver module I was using needed five volts instead of 3.3v, I powered it at 5v and put its data pin through a voltage divider. But the results weren't any better. Interestingly, though, when I tested other remotes with this system, I consistently got specific unique code sequences for different buttons. Why wasn't the minisplit remote working this way?
As I was doing all these things, I was continuing to watch episodes of the reality show Alone. But, as an animal lover, I was finding it increasingly difficult to watch. Does survival really require the killing of absolutely every animal encountered? You would think they could at least leave the squirrels living in the trees near their camps alone. But no, they're shooting them with arrows and stealing their caches of mushrooms!
Later on, when a recreational dose of pseudoephedrine I'd taken late this morning kept me up into the wee hours, I decided to watch Alone's fourth season. That's the one that begins with pairs of survivalists separated by ten miles, with one of each pair having to hike through the jungle to get to the other one. There was a lot less killing and a lot more human suffering in it, so it was much easier to take.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?241204 feedback
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