Silicon Valley Redneck

Can't make it easy, can they?

I needed a couple of connectors... double-row, 0.1" grid (to match a protoboard), male connector right-angle-through-hole, female connector crimp contacts that'll work with 30 AWG wires (to match prewired connectors).

Settled on the AMPMODU series, because why not.  Ordered the right-angle headers, the mating shells, and a bunch of contacts.

Comes time to assemble the thing: the contacts I ordered look awfully tiny.  Oh: they're 2mm AMPMODU, not regular AMPMODU.  Foo.  Regular AMPMODU contacts are only trivially pricier... except for the ones for 30 AWG, which are way pricier.

There's also a contact that's considerably cheaper and might be compatible, but it's not at all clear.  It, and the presumably-correct contact, are provided with incomplete drawings (each incomplete in its own way), and there's nothing about what connectors they're meant to be compatible with.

I'm reminded of why I've long hated AMP.  Trouble is... there was a Great Consolidation around the time of the Dot-Com 1.0 bubble, and choices have been scarce ever since.  Doesn't help that basic boring rectangular connectors are out of fashion nowadays, especially in 0.1" spacing and crimp-type contacts.

Oh, well: a sufficiency of the correct contacts, and a few of the maybe-usable ones, ordered, along with a few specimens of chip I've been wanting to play with for a couple of possible future projects.

Some time out in the hottenhumid

Wasn't really all that hot today, but I haven't adjusted yet.  I need to start getting outdoors earlier, and doing desk stuff during the heat of the afternoon.

Main accomplishment was making another pass over the field with the tiller.  Also, I got the hoses untangled and, roughly speaking, deployed.

Afternoon development: Southmoon is home.  Back from the vet with some special kibble (high fiber) and a bit of some transdermal appetite-boosting drug.  She likes the kibble... unfortunately so does Huckleberry, so assuming it works out we'll have to buy lots of it.  We'll see how she does over the weekend.

Not much work-type work the past couple of days.  Have to catch up on that soon.

Some outdoors time today

The afternoon thunderstorm was cancelled, so I spent some time out in the heat/humidity/sunshine.

Mostly repotting some little plants into window-box planters or tree buckets.  Sunchokes went in tree buckets.  Put buckets in loader bucket, drive out to the strategic topsoil reserve, shovel in several scoops of silt and a couple of scoops of compost per bucket, stir, transport now-heavy buckets to the side-yard, put on saucers for root-containment purposes, add young sunchoke plants, and water heavily.

Over the next few days, I'll be needing to put plants, and seeds, in the actual outdoors garden.  In the actual ground, like.  And making sure everything's properly tagged this time.  New thing: instead of sticking plant labels in the ground to get hidden among emerging weeds, I'll be using nylon shipping tags that zip-tie onto tomato cages, stakes, and the like - up high where I'll be able to see them.  (Writing on them with a paint pen, of course; even the supposedly-for-outdoors magic markers fade rapidly in sunlight.)

And, sometime soon, I should pick up some sweet onion slips to put in the new, improved root-vegetable area.  Sweet potato plants also go there.

Hm.  Should also lug a post with hose holders down there and stick it in the ground.  And run the long hose down there.  Always details.

Exercise is good, but I got overheated.  Brain not working well.

Update:  Main field has some rather robust grassy sprouts coming up.  Maybe I'd better give it one more pass with the tiller before planting (and before putting the hose-storage pole in its place).

Oddly quiet around here.

Southmoon is still having diarrhea - for maybe a month now - and medicating her at home is Not Happening, so we took her to the vet, again, yesterday afternoon.  (It was a long wait; we had a non-emergency appointment shoehorned into what turned out to be an afternoon filled with emergencies.)

She'll be staying there for a while for adventures in medication, diet, and maybe diagnosis.

For such a quiet critter, her absence makes a big difference.  The other four cats are all subdued, and even the various birds aren't making as much commotion as usual.

And I managed to eat breakfast this morning without anyone climbing into my lap and saying "I can haz blueberry muffin?"

Update:  Late-afternoon report from the vet's office says she hasn't been having the diarrhea there.  Should be coming home tomorrow, probably.

Hypersensitive AFCI?

A short, but somewhat intense, thunderstorm blew through this morning.

The breaker for my office tripped off.  Again.

I presume it's something to do with the AFCI, which is there because for some reason the outlets for each bedroom are on the same circuit as the overhead lights.

I need to work up a list of electrician projects - there are several, to be done in stages, and I should get them organized.  Checking and maybe replacing that breaker - I'm disinclined to work on panels myself - should be on the list.

In other weirdness: this morning, Joy's Windows 10 laptop reported the presence of a removable drive, E:, which was her phone.  Which wasn't plugged into the laptop, nor paired via Bluetooth, which that laptop doesn't have anyway.  But wait!  It was some of the files from an older phone!  Which, apparently, were stored on an invisible thumb drive or something.  Then it claimed that there were two DVD drives, both F:, and rebooting repeatedly didn't improve the situation.

So, she's having a "save everything, reformat the drive, reinstall Windows" sort of day.

And I'm trying to figure out how a CRC error is creeping into a communication link, sometimes.  Been chasing possibilities, and ruling them out.  The errors are being detected on the end of the link that isn't under my control (someone else's comm hardware, plus drivers & application software running on Windows), which does make sleuthing that much less convenient.

Update:  Extra funsies on that comm issue!  I set about looking up the specs on the yonder end... which uses a chip for which I can find only a preliminary datasheet from 1997, and it seems the chip is now obsolete (though apparently some board-level vendors stocked up and are still shipping products based on it).

What the flicker?

Power went all blinky-blinky right around 0930.

There's not even a thunderstorm going on this morning.  Looks like we got a bit more rain overnight, but the current weather situation is cloudy, slight breeze, and generally no commotion whomsoever.

Maybe a terrorist squirrel kamikaze attack on a power line?

Did I mention sunshine?

Well, now.

Prior to this morning, the forecast for the day had pretty much been "thunderstorms all day."

This morning, it had evolved to "rain very unlikely; try again tomorrow."

Around midafternoon, Joy and I set out on a couple of fairly-local errands.

As we got in the car after the first errand, things started getting blowy and sprinkly.  Then very wet indeed.  With lightning.

The second errand didn't happen.

By the time we got home - not exactly a long time - the rain gauge was showing half an inch, and the power was off in my office - apparently the lightning had tripped the AFCI breaker for this room*.  By the time I identified and reset the breaker - it wasn't the one that was visibly tripped - the UPSes had run down and the computers were off.

So, have to revive the computers.  The loaner from ToasterCo can wait until it's needed; it'll likely want the VGA monitor dragged in here again to get it to boot.

Meanwhile, the Internet connection had also gotten FUBAR, and has gradually been recovering.  It didn't help that there was also some LAN weirdness, but early symptoms suggested that Spectrum was having routing issues, and cellular Internet was too slow to do anything (like checking outage reports), as is often the case when the landline 'net service is out.

Total rain so far: 0.81".  Looks like there's more on the way... plus tomorrow and maybe Tuesday.  I hope there's a break around the time I need to lock the soggy chickies in their coop.

* The house is presumably wired to code, but it's not wired the way I would have done it.  What's with having lights and outlets for each room on the same circuit?

I seem to have my Summer tan already.

Spent more time out in the sunshine, such as it is.

More walkway mowing, then some Tonka time.  Moved another bunch of dirt around.  Also got some actual exercise lugging bags of potting soil from the truck to a temporary storage location.

Methinks it's time to break out the sunscreen.

Huh.  There's a small tan dog scampering around the lawn next door.  Or is it?  No, I don't think dogs can fly like that.  Must in fact be a tan grocery bag scampering around.

Tired.

Various chores, plus a morning outing to Home Depot and Walmart.

The weather has gotten very warm indeed, and fairly humid, and I'm much overdue for a haircut.  So, having cranial overheating.  Ugh.

Stuff accomplished... one of the segments of the long hose mended (after having gotten severely bunny-nubble last year); additional veggie plants acquired, along with a couple of planters for herbs, some potting soil, and assorted groceries; a wire shelving unit set up on the screened-in front porch to hold plants waiting to be stuck in the ground plus herbs & such for incremental harvesting.

A neighbor built some nice planters from cedar fence boards.  Hm.  I should maybe build a multi-level cedar planter for next year, so's to have something that looks like it belongs on a front porch.  Could still use the wire shelving temporarily for things waiting to be planted out, and the nice cedar thing for herbs, lettuce, and other such things that would sit there all through the warm season.

Being lazy at the moment.  Dinner ingredients are prepped; cooking should soonly commence.

Sometimes, wearing an N95 outdoors makes sense.

Yesterday, for instance.

When I wasn't wearing one while tilling and stirring up dust.

Oooh... my sinuses.

Sinus headache this morning, plus not enough sleep last night because of the crud.  Ugh.

Meanwhile, the weather forecast has been shifting toward not so much rain nor as soon.  Which means there'll be more outdoors time available, but also means that once I plant stuff I'll be needing to water it.

Better get my brain working by midday; I'm sure there'll be toaster work requiring thinky time.

Spring tilling done.

Got the active field tilled again, and it's looking reasonably dead now.

I added a few cubic feet each of perlite and compost to the root-vegetable zone, and gave it a slow, extra-deep tilling, in hopes that the soil will remain diggable until fall.

The slip clutch on the tiller was doing its job; I heard it slip a few times, and one time a rock got positively caught between tines and housing, resulting in nasty noises from the tiller and bogged-down noises from the engine.

So: my garden area is tilled, as are two neighbors' (much smaller) gardens.  Seeds and some ready-started plants are on hand.  Rain is on the way.  I figure I can do planting in between rain.

Oh, and I should build a couple more of the special tall sprinklers, for those times in Summer when it doesn't rain for a while.

That wasn't supposed to involve heavy lifting.

Just catching up on some of the mowing this afternoon.  Not actually catching up, mind, but dealing with some areas that urgently needed attention.

Mowing the tall/rough stuff had been a bit spotty with the new blades.  And then... hm.  Nasty noises when hitting tough spots?  Nasty noises when engaging the blades after they'd been stopped?  Noises that sounds somewhat like slipping, and somewhat like vibrating?

Back to the barn.  Take the deck off.  Drag it to the working-on spot.  Flip it over.

Yup: one of the blades is loose.  Maybe running the impact wrench on a low battery wasn't the right way to tighten the bolts?

Decide to remove the blade for a look-see before retightening.  Edge mostly looks good; a couple of dings from rocks, but in terms of wear from cutting grass and such, it seems to be holding up.

Put it back on.  Tighten the bolt.

Bolt stops before the blade is properly secure.

Futz around for some time.  Discover that the bolt will in fact thread all the way into the spindle, so it's not that the threads have gotten munged or anything like that.

Eventually notice that the special cover washer that comes with the blade is slightly dished, and I must have had the convex side toward the blade.  Put it back together with that washed flipped, and it seems to be secure now.

It's pibroch time, so back to the house, attend to necessities, check e-mail, and see that actual revenue-type work has come over the transom.  Mowing another time; got priorities now.

The Great Incape!

Looks like there's been some burrowing going on.

Specifically, it appears that some pesky rodent has tunneled into the chicken pen and emerged in the middle, right under the coop.  Specifically, right under the blocks where the feeder sits.

I noticed something resembling a li'l gopher hole there a couple of days ago.  This morning, I noticed that all the spilled pellets around the feeder had been vanished.  Hmmmm.

Ah, well.  New procedure: install port plugs on the feeder when closing up the coop for the night, and remove them in the morning.  Any small rodents coming out while the birds are awake presumably become chicken fodder themselves.

Callback hooks should be a thing.

Still, in odd bits of time, digging through the TinyUSB library.

And... maybe callbacks are a thing?  I think, after all this fiddling, I finally found it:

    // Invoked when line coding is change via SET_LINE_CODING
    TU_ATTR_WEAK void tud_cdc_line_coding_cb(uint8_t itf, cdc_line_coding_t const* p_line_coding);

and:

    if ( tud_cdc_line_coding_cb ) tud_cdc_line_coding_cb(itf, &p_cdc->line_coding);

Oho!  Here we go: all's I gotta do is write my own tud_cdc_line_coding_cb, and it should be called at the appropriate time, receiving the interface number (0..n-1) and a pointer to the line-coding struct.  From that, I can set the Baud rate of the bridged UART, or whatever.  Maybe?

OK, so maybe I picked the wrong title.  Documentation should be a thing?  (Not that I'm real good about documenting this stuff either.)  WTFM!

Update:  But maybe that callback thing doesn't work in the Aard-Wino environment?  I tried dropping the callback function, in C, into an Arduino source file, but it didn't seem to get called.  Which... Arduino gets preprocessed into C++ rather than C, maybe?  And function names get mangled?

Guess I need to do one of two things: lean more about Arduino, or switch to a proper C development environment for this stuff.  Which I'll be needing to do eventually anyway, for serious work, but I'd been hoping to postpone that.

Update 2:  Sticking extern "C" in front of the callback function definition doesn't make it work.  Phooey.  Yet more jiggery-pokery is needed.

Update 3:  Putting the callback function in a separate C source file doesn't work, as such, because it should be calling an Ardino thingy - Serial1.begin(), which is a C++ whatziss.  And Arduino helpfully cleans up all compilation products from the project directory, so I can, e.g., find a map file and try to figure out what's going on in the symbol department.

Truly, Arduino is the Common Core "Math" of programming.

Guess I have to use the real tools for real programming.  Which shouldn't be a problem, except, as I recall, the example programs for the real tools are all cmake projects or some such, with very nonobvious configuration going on.

Update 4:  The examples packaged with TinyUSB are in fact in usable form.  It was when they got repackaged as examples for the Pi Pico that they got confusingly rearranged.  Looks like my proper starting point is the TinyUSB library and examples, and once I have one example built for the RP2040 I should be able to run with it.  Though... having some of the other libraries for the Pico would be helpful, if only they were packaged sensibly.

Busy Sunday

Morning: mostly lazy.  I stayed up too late last night.

Late morning: mowing a goodly portion of the front lawn.  Weather is getting breezy, with a hint of sprinkles.

Early afternoon: tilling the main field for the second time (it'll need a third, I think), and also tilling the next-door neighbor's garden patch.

Mid-afternoon: off to Home Depot with Joy, to look at tiles.  She picked out porcelain tiles for the kitchen that almost perfectly match the existing tiles (that do need replacing, because they weren't properly installed, some are broken, the grout is crumbling, etc.), and a stonelike mini-tile pattern for the outside of the fireplace.  Also stop for gas, and for some urgent groceries.  Take a detour on the way home, because there's a flock of twinklies at the big crossroads, blocking our left turn.  Ugh: looks like two cars got very thoroughly smashed.  There had also been an unusual number of sirens about, in other areas along our route.

Home again: that wind is picking up, isn't it?  Like, gusts into the thirties?  I don't think that was in the forecast.

Oh, yes: I hadn't seen the next-door neighbors lately because they'd been out of town since shortly after her mother fell - turned out that Medicare would only pay for in-home rehab services at her home, not theirs, so they had to take her home and stay there to look after her.

Time to be winding down.  There were other things I'd figured on shoehorning into today's schedule, but somehow they didn't happen.

Sometimes abstraction layers need makeovers.

Looking at an implementation of a USB CDC-ACM device....

Yes, there's a standard way to set the Baud rate.  It's passed as an unsigned 32-bit value.  Cool!

But... stty won't play that game.  It accepts some of the unreasonable rates I throw at it (for it to pass along to /dev/ttyACM1), but only a few.  The one I actually need, no.

(I don't really need stty to handle it right now, because the gadget has the speed hard-coded.  I'm looking at future uses.)

Dig out the source code for stty.  And... there's a lookup table for the allowed Baud rates.

I had the vague notion that Linux at least had some option for setting an alternative Baud rate, but, if it does, the command-line utility doesn't use it.  (GtkTerm thinks my special rate is OK, but I haven't confirmed that it's actually setting it that way, let alone that the kernel is passing it along correctly.)

That list of possible Baud rates?  Is left over from the days of the PDP-freakin'-11.  You'd have a crystal oscillator, see, and a divider chain, and a jumper or DIP switch to select the divider stage used for the Baud rate... on the fancier serial boards, there'd be a software-controlled MUX to do the selecting.

These past couple of decades, UARTs have come with higher-frequency master clocks and general-purpose dividers, allowing more or less arbitrary Baud rates within a wide range.  Isn't it kind of time for the higher-level software to recognize this?

(Looks around on the 'Net for a while.)

Ah, here we go: seems termios2 has support for arbitrary Baud rates.  Might figure out how to use it from Ruby, which is where I'd most likely need to set nonstandard rates.  Or, someone's gone and written a little command-line utility to do the job.

Unpacking new stuff

Seemed time to open some boxes that had arrived from Home Depot a few days ago: a Milwaukee M18 21° framing nailer, and two sizes of correlated nails to match.

Flashback to high school stagecraft class: we received a box of clout nails*, packed within a much larger box and thoroughly padded all around with styrofoam packing peanuts.  We found this amusing.

These nails were not so packed; the plastic cases of nails were just tossed into cardboard shipping boxes.  One of the boxes had apparently been roughly handled... the bottom of the plastic case had been broken, allowing some of the contents to escape, and a few of the strips had broken apart.

Oh, well: maybe a dozen or so of the thousand nails will be unusable in the nailer.  Not a big deal.

On to the nailer itself: it's a big, heavy, clunky thing, as one might expect.  Much bigger and more expensive than your basic framing hammer**, but doesn't require as much skill to use for, e.g., nailing at angles without bending nails nor mashing fingers.  It does refuse to fire unless it has at least half a dozen nails in the magazine; this caused consternation when I loaded a fragment from one of the broken strips with what turned out to be exactly the minimum number of nails; it drive the first one, then refused to do another until I figured out what was going on and put in more nails.

Anyway: stack up a couple of scraps of 2x4, and have at it.  It do drive a mean nail!  In fact, I'm gonna have to back off the depth control; the heads got buried pretty darn deep.  Apparently even the mechanized nail-driver calls for a certain amount of learning.

Probably next week there'll be some actual work to do with it.

Oh, yes: I also unpacked a recent eBay acquisition: the latest cheap used Dell small-form-factor PC.  This one was bought sans hard drive, but I'd just remove the HDD anyway and install a new $30-ish SSD.  Looks to be in good order.  This one comes with a Core i5 and 8GB of RAM, and has two expansion slots, lessee, apparently those are half-height PCIe, one x4 and one x16.  Anyway, in the event that I decide it needs a parallel port or two for running LinuxCNC, there are places to plug in the cards, assuming I can come up with suitable cards with the half-height faceplates.  Or I could use it for something else, and get a cheap used full-sized mini tower system for the CNC thing when the time comes.

Update:  Ordered from Amazon a couple of cheap PCIe parallel-port cards that reportedly do work with LinuxCNC and come with both sizes of faceplate, for delivery around early June-ish.  Also a DVD of The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe, because why not.

 

* That's what we called them, anyway.  It seems the term is commonly used to refer to roofing nails, which IIRC these weren't; they were an odd sort of nail used in quick & dirty theatrical set construction.  I have only a vague recollection of what they looked like.

** Which sounds like a demonym, doesn't it?

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the art of automobile maintenance

So Joy has started taking martial-arts classes at a local fitness place.

She had to go there in person to get the current schedule, and when she got there the owner was working on a vehicle.  Which seems appropriate, given that the building was clearly an auto-repair shop originally - lots of roll-up doors, and architecture that in general screams repair shop.

Anyway, turns out they have a women's Jiu-Jitsu class two evenings a week; she went to one, and is hooked.  It's apparently the antithesis of what "fitness" classes for women and/or older people have become the last few years - the trend being to "don't exert yourself, be very very careful, you don't want to get hurt."  Maybe the trend is driven by large-organization liability paranoia, and a family business in rural Tennessee can get away with a different attitude?

Having some indoors time.

Rainy yesterday - the early morning forecast showed something less than 10% chance of rain, but an hour or so later I heard a downspout gurgling, and the weather report had been updated from "hardly any chance of rain" to "rain basically all day."

Supposed to be rainy today, tomorrow, and Sunday, before sunnying up for the beginning of May.  Well, there's plenty of indoors stuff I should be doing, but there's also a lot of yard stuff I need to catch up on.

Yesterday was fairly damp, and an unexpected chunk of the afternoon went to toaster stuff, including fun with a butterfly effect in some FPGA code (make a minor change, and suddenly unrelated functions start misbehaving in inexplicable ways).  I need to start playing with the Efinix FPGAs; I think their toolchain is at least currently maintained, unlike the Xilinx software that supports the older Spartan parts.