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remotely pulsing an LED
Thursday, December 5 2024
There were four or five inches of snow on the ground here in Hurley this morning, enough for me to shovel out the driveway. But that didn't take much time or effort. I still have a problem in my right elbow that dates to when we deployed the dock back in early April. It mostly only affects me at night when I go to turn over. Usually once the tendons, stretch, warm up, or otherwise get going they no longer hurt much. But I could feel them tweaking a little as I shoveled the snow. (This wasn't the first time I'd shoveled snow since that injury; remember I'd had to shovel snow at the cabin last weekend.)
Later in the afternoon, I took Charlotte for her usual afternoon walk, this time in the snow. Some deer saw me approaching and didn't seem too concerned, even though it's still hunting season. Evidently they know me from my many afternoon hikes and do not consider me a threat. They also know Charlotte, and she chased them as she usually does. But she gave up right away and hopefully didn't drain too much of their energy. Fortunately I knew there to be no hunters in the direction she chased them towards.
Since it's looking like I'm not going to be able to figure out the patterns of codes used by the minisplit's infrared remote at the cabin, I've been looking at other means of controlling it. People who do work similar to what I do have figured out the codes transmitted by the little ESP32-based WiFi board that plugs into a USB port on the minisplit, though all of that is under the ESPHome ecosystem (which could be viewed as a more-fully-developed alternative to the Arduino code in my ESP8266 Remote Controller system). If I wanted to wade into understanding that system, I could probably configure it to communicate with the backend I've built. But I'd rather just know the control codes being sent at 9600 baud to the minisplit controller and send them with an ESP8266 I'd programmed entirely myself. Fortunately, I managed to find some code that I might be able to use as the basis for that. I would then have to figure out how to have it pick up settings with polls to my server, much the way my existing ESP8266s know when to turn relays on and off.
Meanwhile, the ability to flash IR pulses on a remote ESP8266s is too good of a feature not to implement, even if I can't apply it to the task of controlling the cabin minisplits. So this evening while Gretchen was off at pilates and then watching a movie with Nancy and the dogs down in Old Hurley, I put in the effort to get that whole IR system working. Most of the effort went into my data.php file, to which I had to add endpoints for first capturing IR pulse sequences from an ESP8266 running a crude IR-recorder firmware and storing them in a database and then retrieving them (as a concept I call a "command") and "playing" them on a targeted ESP8266. Once played, the command is then marked "done" and the blinking ceases. This required building out the command and (command_type) functionality. Fortunately, I didn't have to build any editors allowing me to create and edit commands, as all I had to do was add the tables to the now-overcrowded navigation and the editors were automatically created for me through the power of the underlying homebrewed framework. To test this functionality, I wired a conventional LED (so I could see it blink with my unaided eyes) to my test ESP8266 board. When it blinked every time I unchecked the "done" checkbox in the associated command, I decided I'd earned the right to drink booze. I figure I can use such functionality to do all sorts of great things, including remotely playing audio (the core feature of my Disturbatron repository).
By late this evening I was re-watching some of the juicier parts of Alone, particularly the tap-out-inducing injuries and freakouts about the existence of predators. I'm rarely-to-never rooting for the humans as I watch; it's easy for me to cast them in my mind as villains or marauding space aliens wreaking havoc on a beautiful natural utopia.
The stone wall south of the Chamomile this afternoon, covered in snow.
Click to enlarge.
The stone wall at the bottom of the Woodshed Trail this afternoon, also covered with snow. You can see the white frame of a south-facing basement window of our house in the distance.
Click to enlarge.
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