Silicon Valley Redneck

Ongoing rain is ongoing.

Yesterday's all-day variable drizzle (sometimes a very heavy drizzle) continues.  Supposed to give way to scattered thunderstorms later on, followed by a sunny weekend.

Sometime when it's not raining, I need to fetch my 3D printer from the barn.  When things dry out a bit, I should hit the driveway weeds with herbicide... and take the strimmer to the stuff under and around the bushes... and mow the front lawn... and, well, there's no end of stuff to be done.

Meanwhile, there's also rainy-day stuff; been reworking Ardunio Pro Mini boards for battery operation, and likewise some sensor boards that came with unsuitable onboard voltage regulators.  Need to cobble up that solar battery charger circuit, and have that ready for testing tomorrow.  And, there's some Arduino coding to be done, which this time involves using some PCINT pins for wakeup.

Sometime soon, I need to make a decision regarding near-term machine tools.  Logistical considerations seem to be pointing toward Sherline, with bigger machinery to follow once the barn is upgraded to a workshop (next spring, we hope).

... Pegboard.  I need to round up some pegboard.  Off to the Internet, shopping, again.  That may have to be part of the Home Depot order I need to organize soon, with the lumber and concrete mix and paint and stuff.

Now, there's a clickbaity headline for ya

Earth life may have traveled to Venus aboard sky-skimming asteroid

The amazing story: phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus could be produced by microbes, which could conceivably have been transported from Earth's atmosphere by a passing chunk of rock.  Hey, it might have happened!

What the headline conjures: Rocket J. Squirrel meets Off on a Comet!

Prius update

Just heard from the repair shop: the wire for the crankshaft position sensor was indeed chewed up.  Bonus: apparently the specific HV transaxle fault code refers to an engine/transaxle speed mismatch, which would be caused by the crankshaft position sensor being disconnected.

They also noted a couple of light bulbs being out, the tires being about due for replacement, and oil seepage around the timing cover (a known problem the past couple of years).  I guess if the wiring repair gets it running properly with no further faults, I'll have them deal with everything else as long as it's there, including routine maintenance and replacing the 12V battery.

Should add up to considerably less than 10% the price of a new car, which would be my threshold for contemplating replacing the whole thing.  (The "don't laugh; it's paid for" principle applies here.)

Update:  The wiring fix apparently eliminated all the fault codes, so I'm having them fix all the fiddly stuff, replace the tires, do scheduled maintenance, and replace the 12V battery.  The timing cover gasket can wait for another time; I'll monitor the oil level, and if it needs oil added, I'll put in Geritoil™ to hold it together for maybe another couple of years.  Maybe next year will bring an opportunity for some restoration work, replacing worn-out bits of plastic and whatnot.

Cat cognition?

A strange thing happened a moment ago.

There was a mad scratching sound from the middle bathroom, as if a cat were chasing some manner of vermin.

Then Southmoon came around the wall, into my office, and demanded admission to the mouse closet* - which is just on the other side of the wall from the bathroom.

So... did she chase something that disappeared, maybe under the vanity, and then came to this side of the wall to look for it?

* Southmoon seems to believe that I keep the mice in my office closet.  Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Boyds Creek: all three places, the office closet was part of her patrol, and she'd squeak at me to open the door so she could take inventory.

Progress on the radio front

Not so much the radio side of things, more the digital bits.

I wired up a radio module to an Arduino Pro Mini, plugged it into a basic FTDI 3.3V-logic-level serial dongle, programmed it as the receiver, and hey presto!  Error-free reception.  Looks like the CH341 chip and/or its Linux driver was the entire problem.

And, I'm reminded that the Arduino IDE is not meant for working on more than one thing at a time on a given host machine.  Not only does changing the serial-port selection in one window change it in all windows, so does changing the board type.  Which you'd think would be per-project, but no.

I suppose I could wire up the test circuit for the solar battery charger (one-each LiFePO4 cell ought to be stupid simple, I think), though testing must needs wait on a sunny day.

The off-brand Pro Mini boards I have on hand lack the jumper for disconnecting VCC from the voltage regulator and power-on LED, so I may need to do some desoldering on the ones that are meant to be solar-powered.  At least the LED (or its series resistor, whatever) needs to go.

And I finally got around to measuring a T-post, to confirm that the sensor housing currently in CAD could be easily zip-tied to one.

Drizzle, drizzle, little cloud

Er.  Great big cloud?  Not exactly little, according to the weather map.

Seems Ærial Swamp Beta (yes, tropical weather is into on-beyond-zebra season) is passing through today and tomorrow, wafted along by vague breezes out of the southwest.  Supposed to be raining most of the time, but not very heavily right here.

The morning trudge to fetch the paper was damp, but undramatic.

Wouldn't be a good time to receive a shipment of, say, fence-post mix.

Oh, well.  Got plenty of indoors stuff to catch up on.

Another week, another Wednesday

Let's see, now...

AAA sent a tow truck to haul the Venerable Prius off to the Toyota service place, way over in the next county (other side of the Big City, even).  Getting it onto the truck involved some maneuvering under electric power, which did indeed work.  Supposed to be getting a diagnosis on the morrow; the service guy did confirm that they see a lot of vehicles with rodent-gnawn wiring.  If that turns out to be the problem, I may need to take Measures to make the parking areas less rodent-friendly.

Various shipments of Stuff came in today, including a couple that were scheduled for Friday-or-so but happened to show up earlier.

And, I'm reminded of yet another annoyance with the Arduino development environment: not all the ADC channels are available.  On this occasion, what I want to do is to use VCC as the analog reference, and read the value of the bandgap reference - this being a trick whereby the supply voltage (which in this application will be the battery voltage) can be measured without the need of external components in the form of a (battery-depleting) voltage divider.  But, it looks like the standard library function to read an ADC channel only handles the Approved Analog Input Pins for the selected Arduino model.

I think last time I needed to use a non-approved channel (might have been the bandgap reference that time, too) I ended up hacking the library.  I shouldn't have to do that!

Hm.  Still a little daylight left.  Rain isn't supposed to arrive until, let's see, not long at all.  So I guess I won't be nipping out to spray herbicide on the parking area previously covered by the non-running car.  Have to do that after the rain passes, Friday evening or whenever.  And I wonder if sprinkling cayenne pepper on the ground discourages rodents?

 

I see that MiniTrue recognizes neither "bandgap" nor "gnawn" as official words.

Never as easy as it looks

So here I am, playing with what should be a simple little test: two nRF24L01+ boards hooked up to two Arduino Nano boards; two simple sketches invoking the RF24 library.

Complication the first: my desktop USB 3.0 hub is not a suitable place to plug in, apparently, some older sorts of USB devices (I'd seen this earlier, but forgotten it).  Gets a weird kernel error message and the device fails to enumerate.

Complication the second: the version of the RF24 library bundled with the version of the Arduino IDE that I have on my old workstation apparently is missing some functionality relative to the current on-line documentation.

Complication the third: while the Arduino IDE happily allows running multiple instances concurrently - which is to say, more than one sketch open in separate windows - the instances are not actually separate.  Selecting the serial port in one changes the serial port selection in all, making it kinda useless for working on a multi-Arduino configuration with a single host system.

Complication the fourth: it looks like my wiring isn't right, somehow - or at least the sketches don't appear to be communicating correctly with the nRF chips.  This requires some investigation.  Wired wrong, or configured wrong in the sketch?

Anyway... once I get this pesky thing working, I should be able to set one unit transmitting while I wander off carrying the other one, receiving, and see how far I get before messages start getting dropped.  On paper, I think it should work as far as the back fence, trees and all.  Maybe.  Then I can start adding actual functionality to it.

Update:  After fixing a couple of bonehead mistakes - maybe I've been away from the programming for too long? - the gadgets are in fact communicating.  Except...

These Nano boards use CH341 USB UARTs.  There seems to be some Issue with the ch341 driver on this (outdated) version of Linux.  Maybe it's only a problem when there are two of the chips connected; maybe it's something else.  But whatever it is, things keep going FUBAR on the serial-communication front.

It's always something.  At least it looks like I'm talking to the radios correctly.

Update 2:  During the brief window before the ch341 driver frotzes out, communication is happening... but only the first few (actual number somewhat variable) bytes of the message arrive ungarbled.  Don't these chips use CRC checking?  Is there some problem with getting the bytes off the chip at the receive end, or onto the chip at the transmit end, outside of the CRC-protected part of the process?  (Possible; I used a couple of inches of wire-wrap wire to connect everything.  But how is it happening where it's happening?  Maybe I need to add bulk bypass capacitors to the boards?)

Update 3:  So much for putting these cheap Nano boards to (some of) the use I'd intended; I connected one to the laptop, which has a recent version of Linux Mint installed, and got the same problem with the ch341 driver getting a weird error after only a little bit of communication.  Seems a lot of people have been getting this particular error when connecting such things to RasPi hosts - and, since I'd figured on connecting one of these to a RasPi to act as the hub, this is kinda bad news.

So... back, I guess, to using a Pro Mini with a separate, well-behaved, USB serial adapter.  Should still be able to use the Nanos for remotes, though dragging the built-in USB interface along can't be good for the power consumption.

Update 4:  Looks like the data garblement is probably happening somewhere in the UART department - could be there's just a little too much Baud-rate mismatch between the ATmega328 and the CH341.  Or something.  But the radio side of things, at least, appears to be working.  Now maybe I need to add a very bright LED to the receiver, with code to toggle it when a valid packet arrives, then hook up a battery and wander off.

Update 4⅝:  Yeah, current garblage is definitely in the serial-port portion of the path; sometimes constant text is getting mangled between AVR memory and the terminal.  Have to wire up a radio module to a Pro Mini board, connect using a decent serial dongle, and see how that goes.

Update 5:  Make the code modification; find a suitable LED; wire it up; connect 3.3V power to the 3V3 pin.  The POWER LED comes on, but nothing else happens.  Er.  Maybe this flavor of Nano doesn't run unless its USB side is powered?  Apply 3.3V to the 5V pin.  It runs!  And (being a fair distance from the transmitter at this point) the LED stops blinking when I disconnect the antenna.  So, good.  Except that the idea of using these Nano boards anywhere in this setup is kinda toast, since the remotes are supposed to run off LiFePO4 cells connected directly to the 3V3 pin.  Oh, well.  I have a respectable supply of Pro Mini boards, I think.

(Wanders off singing Ard Uino Promini.)

Update 6:  With transmit power set to maximum and the LNA enabled, the signal reaches from my desk, through a window, down the driveway just about to the road.  Taking the receiver out back, I find that, what with all the additional clutter and walls and so on, it just about reaches the vicinity of the barn.  Kinda marginal.

But... that's with the really cheap antennae that came with the modules, which look remarkably like the really cheap antennae that came with the PCIe dual-band WiFi cards I bought a while back.  I've ordered some bigger, less-cheap antennae of a couple of different flavors, one of them 2.4 GHz only.  Should improve the situation, I think.  Only takes a few dB of improvement to go from marginal to fine for near-term purposes.

And, I have a good supply of the Pro Mini boards.  Got to install some headers.

Payment screwiness

Last week, I ordered some small parts from Mouser Electronics.  I couldn't get a credit-card payment to go through on either of the saved cards, nor by re-entering the info for one of those cards.

(Come to think of it, the reason for my having two saved cards might have been a problem in processing the previous order.)

I didn't get any warnings from either bank, and neither account shows any failed transactions.

Could, perhaps, be yet another Chrome issue.  Maybe next time I should try it in Firefox?

42, my friends, is blowin' in the wind

OK, so there's no wind at the moment, but the early-morning low is indeed 42°F as the Sun rises.

Starting to feel decidedly autumnal out there.  Time to switch the HVAC from "cool" to "heat", at least at night.  (And why, oh why, do residential thermostats have a mode switch instead of "heat if below" and "cool if above" settings?)

Getting around to the occasional movie

Well, one movie anyway.  We finally saw Support Your Local Sheriff, whereof I'd bought the DVD* sometime last year, based on a recommendation by some rando at, if memory serves, DesignCon.  (I'd mentioned the plan to find a place with a big backyard, and in that context made some remark about a muzzle-loading cannon, which brought forth a connection to the film.)

It's a fun little movie.  Not great, but fun.  Good for a family movie night, unless of course you have a brood of modern youngsters with femtosecond** attention spans.  And, yes, there's a cannon.

 

* Why buy the DVD?  Well... either it wasn't available for streaming, or the charge for streaming it would have been close to the price of the DVD.  I don't think the movie-distribution companies have got the economics figured out.

** MiniTrue's browser informs me that "femtosecond" isn't a word, and suggests "microsecond", which is only off by a factor of 10⁹.

I still owe you an answer, don't I?

No, it isn't 42.  This is an answer whereto the question has been known for 2 years.

Yes, two years ago I posted thusly:

Why is this Talk Like a Pirate Day different from all other Talk Like a Pirate Days?

And I'd intended, then, to provide the answer in a year-end review... then in 2019's year-end review... and, for one reason or another, still didn't get around to it.

Well!

Those who know us in person will mostly have heard the news at one time or another, but here it is on the record: two years ago, Joy and I made it official.  Got married, like.  All legal and proper.  Told the IRS and everything.

It wasn't exactly a monster wedding - more along the lines of Marryin' Sam's basic $2 ceremony, though with inflation and including county fees it ended up costing more like $200.  In fact, it was the form Pastor Rick, of Bay Area Ceremonies, calls an "Elopement Special", though it wasn't exactly an elopement; we brought my father along as guest and witness.

In keeping with the spirit of the day, Joy had written custom pirate-themed vows.  The officiant, having read up on TLaPD and noted the Pastafarian connection, donned a colander at one point.

(Yeah, we got married on the Day of Atonement, which coincided with Talk Like a Pirate Day that year.  Inauspicious, or oddly appropriate?)

Ah, the magic of guess gauges!

So... I think I'd mentioned that after the Younger Prius had its 12V battery run down a few weeks ago, the gas gauge was showing empty, as is expected behavior for a Prius after a power cycle.  Adding a couple of gallons of lawnmower (Baptist) gas didn't change that.  So, this morning I finally got around to making a gas station run to fill 'er up proper.

Turns out that the couple of short trips recently had been enough to get the gas gauge reading again, and 'twas showing slightly over half a tank as I set out.  What it actually took to fill it was a bit over 2.6 gallons, so in fact it was considerably over half.  (Did I mention that these things seem to be nonlinear?)

On the way there, I looked at the speedometer and saw a number in the upper 60s.  Wait, on Boyds Creek Highway, in the dark?  Oh.  Metric.  Either it reset itself to metric after the power cycle or the "ludicrous speed" button got pushed.  Guess I should look for the button, once there's enough light, and put it back to proper 'Murrican! units.

Anyway.  Younger Prius running OK and all gassed up, though I should probably order a new 12V battery for it.  Tundra, all seems to be in order now.  Venerable Prius, well, I guess it goes to the Official Toyota Mechanic next week; if its acute problems can be fixed for some reasonable price, I'll also have them do routine maintenance and replace the 12V battery, and come spring I'll see about doing some restoration work.

Unclear on the concept: "bookcase"

So I'm thinking it's past time to set about unpacking the library....

The basement, being stable at right around 50% humidity, is looking like a good place to set up a bunch of cheap bookcases into which the vast accumulation of books might be unpacked, thereby freeing up a whole bunch of floor space in the barn as well as making the books available for actually reading.

So I start shopping for big, budget-priced bookcases.

Oh, here's something that fits the budget!  But, no shipping; available for in-person pickup only.  Also, the shelves are rated something like 35 pounds each, which isn't exactly a lot of books.

I look further.  Y'know, just about every photo of a "bookcase" with the shelves occupied depicts a sparse population of knickknacks.  Not books.  I guess that's consistent with the wimpy load ratings.

Guess this round of shopping is going to be nontrivial.  Also, I should probably get a handle on just how many feet of shelf space I need.  And... maybe wire shelving instead of particle-board bookcases?

Yeah, yeah: he who dies with the most books wins, but sometimes 'tis a pain.

Update:  Commencing guesstimation!  The bedroom bookcases were, let's see, I think there were 5 of them, times about 6 shelves per, times about 3 feet wide.  So that's, for a first approximation, 90 feet of shelf space...

... But!  Many of those shelves were double-stacked, and then some.  So, maybe budget for 250 feet?

Then there's the matter of storing the CDs and DVDs; probably want to keep some selection of those in the entertainment room (maybe along with a selection of books), and the rest can live in the basement with the bulk of the books.

Unusual weather

We are indeed having rain this morning.  Nearly half an inch so far.  But...

It's arriving vertically.  Straight down, like.  And steadily.

Most of the rain I've seen here so far has arrived moving 15 MPH or so horizontally, and in intense bursts.  This is much tamer.  I guess that's the difference between a regular summer thunderstorm and the fringe of a worn-out hurricane.

There's runoff, but it doesn't look like it's doing much to the driveway.  I'll still need to get out there with the box blade someday soon.