I just finished writing the code for an idea I had about a year ago, but until now I was not sure how to implement it. The code is just a POC at the moment, though I am not sure if this idea has any real value. That said, I did privately share the code with a knowledgeable and trustworthy friend. Perhaps between the two of us, we can determine a use case. Though I have tentatively set a date -- one or two years hence -- upon which I will release the code as open source, if we cannot find a viab...

So the IR LEDs that we use to illuminate our daughter's room started to fail recently, enough that we noticed a significant decrease in visibility on the baby monitor. When I inspected the IR LEDs, only 1/3 were working. I found some replacement LED boards on AliExpress, and they arrived yesterday. But the replacements boards were smaller then the exisiting one. I thought I screwed myself over since I did not check the dimensions before placing the order, but then I noticed something. The LED b...

We went to the Rockwood Conservation Area, and my daugther had a great time playing in the sand and the lake. Once she realized that the lake was like a giant bath, she wanted to go into the water and splash constantly. I swam across the lake and back, so I am very tired. All in all it was a good day. Before I went to bed, I tried working with these 8x8 pixel displays I purchased a few years ago. The last time I used them they would only produce random garbage, and when I started using them aga...

We went out for brunch today, and my daugther who has been sick the last week and not always eating or drinking enough, devoured her food and even ate all the bananas and blueberries off my plate. She even drank some of my orange juice, and appeared to enjoy it. We were relieved, and we look forward for her to go back to daycare. I also had two packages arrive today, and I was looking forward to testing components and assembling the case for my component tester. Unfortunately the mounting holes...

Had to cancel our trip to Collingwood, our daugther was still not feeling well and travelling with a sick child is not ideal. We will try to do something when she feels better, hopefully that will happen before I have to go back to work. After I complained to my friend Peter that my electronics knowledge is not as good as I wanted, he asked if I wanted a copy of an electronics book he owns. I thought I recognized it, but I wasn't sure where I may have put it. So I decided to clean up some of th...

Managed to resume my GMail backups after a 4 year hiatus, using gmvault. The author created a docker version, and I was able to resume where I left off. Now I want to set this up for my wife as well, but I will have to use a separate container. Each container runs it's own set of daily and weekly cron jobs to backup the emails. If this works correctly, I should look at what they do so I could use that approach for my personal projects. I am also taking Monday to Wednesday off for vacation, we...

In frustration, I updated the cron script to reboot the RPi Zero if it is unable to establish a connection to the main router. It is a little heavy-handed, but I was getting really frustrated that the baby monitor was not connected when we needed it. Perhaps I will find a better method of re-establishing the WiFi connection without rebooting the RPi Zero. UPDATE: 2020-08-21 Our network has stabilized since I added this hack, and the RPi Zero has not rebooted yet. Now that things has settled, I ...

Turns out that cron script does not work. The baby monitor lost WiFi connection twice, and both times I had to reboot the router for the connection to be restored. Looking at the logs I saw the entries when it was not able to connect to the router, but those commands did not allow it to re-establish a connection. My parents and my brother came by today to help remove most of the junk we had accumulated in our yard over several years. The first load came in at 695 kg, mostly because of all the e...

Parts arrived today for the activity centre (a.k.a. busy box) that I am making for my daugther. Some of the surface mounted components are extremely tiny, I may need to buy pair of magnifying glasses so that I can see what I am doing. Perhaps one of the cheap ones available at the pharmacy will work. Network outages are still happening, but now only in the evening while we are streaming some shows. The outage is short, but still frustating especially if it happens multiple times. The issue with...

I was going to write tonight that finding a bizarre entry in the logs files on my old desktop about the Network Manager going to sleep (which is odd for Ethernet connection, rather then a WiFi connection), may have been the cause of all the network outages we were experiencing. I do not know how the Sleep Mode was enabled, but perhaps one of the many software updates that came through added to our network instability. Then the router rebooted itself twice this evening, in the middle of streamin...

Went to visit our neighbour this afternoon to catch up with them. Mina mentioned that we may be moving after she finishes her degree, and they were surprised. They assumed we would be staying around for a long time, but we may have to move to wherever Mina can find work in her field. We hope I can also find similar work there as well. I have been running PiHole on my desktop for the last 24 hours, and after updating the Router and the TV, everything has been working fine. Though I just noticed ...

Removed the manual DNS on the router, disabled PiHole on my old desktop, installed PiHole on my current desktop and added a manual DNS on the router on point to my current desktop. Everything seems to work, I just need to update the static DNS on the SmartTV and I will see how stable PiHole is supposed to be. After installing PiHole, but before updating the router it forced my computer to reboot when it was not able to connect to the router. I suspect that could be the culprit, so I will have t...

Had lunch with Peter and his daugther today, it was good to catch up in person. I got an email from Amazon, saying the bottle of hand sanitizer I put purchased is not safe to use and is being recalled. The link they shared lists over 50 other brands. I used to refill one of the empty hand sanitizers we use when changing Parisa, but we have not used it yet. I did refill the small bottle we keep in the car, and that one we have used. So we are just going to throw them out, I think we still have b...

Removed the fallback WiFi connections on the babypi monitor, hopefully that will stabilize the IP address hopping I have been observing. It seems that when it connected to one of the other fallback WiFi access points, the router would assign the host a new IP address. I also installed shellinabox on babypi and enabled access in the RPi-Monitor dashboard. It worked immediately, so I thought it would be a good idea to install it on my old desktop and enable it in it's RPi-Monitor dashboard. Unfor...

Scheduled a lunch with Peter on Friday. Played his game that he created using the Godot engine, it was an exercise for an online course he is taking. Organized some of my electronics projects into individual bins, but I still have alot of stuff to put away. I need to find a large lockable storage container, like a filing cabinet or something similar, hopefully one that will not cost too much. ...

Went to Victoria Park this morning, and met up with Parisa's former babysitter. She agreed to take some photos of the three of us while we were there, and some of them were quite good. ...

Went to Grand Bend Beach, we had a great time, but we are very tired. ...

I had the day off today, and the wife and I went out for lunch for the first time since the lockdown started back in March. Then we started to get stuff ready for our trip to Grand Bend on Friday for the day at the beach. ...

I wanted to look at my serial bluetooth board, but I wanted to relax this evening since I am taking the next two days off. I would like to figure out if I actually damaged the HC-05 in my testing of the AT-09 boards, but I also wanted to look at the anniversary gift I made over two years ago and see if I can figure why the alarm does not work as expected. I also need to sketch out the electrical and programmatic design on the activity centre (a.k.a. busy box) for Parisa, as well the design the ...

A package I ordered back in the beginning of May finally arrived. I got a message from AliExpress a few days ago saying my package was on its way, so it seems the original shippment was lost. Considering the time between the message and package arrival, they spared no expense to get it here. So I tested the /component tester, and it works really well! I tested some resistors and capacitors, and the values it comes back with is very close to the marked values. I don't know what I was expecting w...

New keyboard and mouse arrived today, and they both seem to work. I tested them in a few different scenarios, and they both fared quite well. I did not get enough work done today, so I am trying to do a little more work this evening so I do not fall further behind. ...

Had a great day with family today. Parisa had a blast playing with everyone, and even gave her little cousin a kiss. My Dad had expressed interest in making some bread, but he wanted to start by making sourdough bread. He decided not to try making any because he wasn't willing to wait a week for the starter to ferment, so I decided to show him the relatively quick recipe I use. It takes about 3-4 hours, but it could be shaved down to 2-3 hours. So I demonstrated how the recipe for him, but I al...

Visited my brother, sister-in-law and our nephew this afternoon. He is very cute, and quite expressive for a 2.5 month year old. We went to my parents' place for dinner, and to stay overnight. We are celebrating the summer birthdays tomorrow. ...

The wireless transmitters I ordered finally arrived, I received the wireless receivers last week. I tested them out soon after they arrived and they appeared to work sending 5 V through 5 mm of wood, but I wanted to do a more detailed test. So I connected the receiver board to one of the LiPo charger boards I have, and I wanted to observe if I could get a consistent 4.2 V at the LiPo charger. I used a wooden spacer to mimic my use case, which is to providing a wireless charging option for the a...

I was supposed to try working on the HC-05 serial bluetooth board this evening, but I found some interesting websites during the day. One was an easily deployable Wiki, but it appears too complicated for me to use as a knowledge base. I also realized that I can publish notes in my Standard Notes as a blog, but I did not think my notes were sufficiently organized/coherent to warrant a blog. It is nice to know I could move these entries there. I did download BoostNote to organize my notes for my ...

Looking above the granite entrance-way, she noticed the engraved phrase written in Latin: "Sic Itur Ad Astra". Octavio noticed that Dr. Singh-Lee was staring at the words written into the stone, "It means 'Reach for the stars'" he uttered. "Actually it means 'Thus we go to the stars'" she said calmly. "Isn't it the same thing?" he remarked quickly, noting the confidence with which she spoke. "What is at the end of that hallway?" she asked, pointing to the dimly lit walls of the mausoleum. #story...

Found a sketch that creates a radar map from ultrasonic sensors (like US-015), and is processed by a python script. If it is possible to convert the python script into C++, and find a way to display the radar image on a webpage, I could make it available from the ESP32-CAM dashboard. ...

Did a small test of the wireless charging receiver boards I ordered. I plugged one into a 5 V source (an Arduino), and measured a small positive voltage on the other with a multimeter. The reading on the multimeter was not 5 V, but if I created a better setup I might get a more reliable measurement. ...

I stumbled across an interesting algorithm for finding rational approximations to real numbers: Farey Approximation. I found an implementation in Python and C++, but they did not always give the expected answer. I simplified the code, and I was able to get the values that one would expect. ...

I heard the sad news that Grant Imahara from Mythbusters died of a brain aneurysm. He was only eight years older then me, and it got me thinking about my life. Now that we have Parisa, not only do we need to take better care of ourselves, but it makes sense that we get a few things organized in case something terrible were to happen to either of us. Mina and I had already made plans to share access to bank accounts, but now we want to organize all the online/offline things that we should know o...

Finally chatted with Peter this evening, he shared with me his updates to the code for his HAB project. Perhaps I should get back into it as well. I tested the serial bluetooth boards last night, and I found an Arduino sketch that worked with the AT-09/MLT-BT05 boards. Turns out that all of them are slave-only boards, still useful but not what I thought I was getting. Still have not gotten the HC-05 to work completely, but that sketch I found does not seem to work with it, even if I put it in c...

The city finally came by to cut down the dead tree in our front yard, only took them six months. I hope I do not have to wait six months or more for them to replace the tree. Went for a bike ride this evening, feeling extra tired. I did not get a chance to chat with Peter this evening, perhaps he decided to crash early. Testing HC-05 again, but mostly relaxing this evening. ...

Internet connection dropped at least twice today. Peter re-scheduled our weekly chat to tomorrow evening, without an internet connection that would probably be for the best. Saw a repo claiming most DS18B20 sensors are clones, and provided Arduino code to discover and classify each DS18B20. The two waterproof DS18B20 I purchased are D1 type clones. Apparently they are noisy, and have supercapacitors instead of EEPROM for alarms. Though the author also claims that these clones have a 3 C offset ...

Mike and Lisa came to visit today, and they had a great time with Parisa. She also had a great time with both of them, an improvement compared to even a few months ago when she would freak out whenever she encountered Mike. I tried to get record the serial transmissions from the HC-05 using the Logic Analyzer, bypassing the Arduino and using a USB-to-TTL (FTDL) board. I could observe the signals being sent, but the HC-05 never responded. I tried different baud rates, line endings, putting the H...

Managed to get the Logic Analyzer working, I had to install firmware for the generic driver. I also had to install and enable udev rules so that the regular user has USB access. Tested the logic analyzer by generating a 5 bit counter with an Arduino Uno, and I was able to detect the signal. I tried to connect the HC-05 and AT-09 serial Bluetooth boards to the logic analyzer, but I can only get the HC-05 and one AT-09 to pair with my phone. However only the HC-05 registers a connection when the ...

Had a long chat with Brendan. Hopefully we will continue to chat on a regular basis, though perhaps for shorter sessions ;) ...

Forgot to write an update last night. I tried for almost two hours to get serial bluetooth modules to work to no avail. I found a webpage with debugging instructions to try, and if that fails I will try to use the Logic Analyzer again. ...

Went for a bike ride this evening, and it is was still hot outside. Tried to use the Logic Analyzer to read the output from the serial bluetooth board, but I think I need to follow a tutorial since I seem to have forgotten how to use it. I did test the tiny boost converters with some drained batteries, and they were all able to boost 0.7 V to ~3.3V ...

Brendan agreed to chat more frequently so we don't have so much to catch up on when we do get together. Mina was very tired, and his daughter looked very bored while we chatted. I tried to connect to the bluetooth serial devices I purchased, but I either cannot pair them or cannot send or receive to them. The original bluetooth board worked fine, but not I cannot get it to work with the old sketches anymore. Perhaps the logic analyzer will show me what is going on, but I need to re-install the ...

Mowed the lawn, and got the pizza sauce ready for Saturday. Going to make the pizza dough in the morning, and defrost and marinate the meat for the BBQ. Had Brendan and his daugther visit this afternoon. I made the pizza dough in the morning, and made the pizza before they arrived. His daughter really liked the pizza, and Brendan really liked the chicken drumsticks. We had a lot to catch up on, and it seems like we have a lot more to do. I asked if Brendan wanted to chat more frequently, but i...

Solder pins onto the Arduino Nanos I got awhile ago, as well as the tiny power boost boards. One of the nanos did not have the bootloader loaded, and after an hour of trying I was not able to get it loaded. Not sure what I can do to install the bootloader on this Nano, but if I cannot I still have one that works. Still noticed the different IP for the baby monitor after a reboot, but at some point today it switch to the reserved IP in the router. Not sure what that is about. Going to try to cu...

My parents came over for Canada Day, and they spent alot of time with Parisa. We took Parisa outside in the afternoon to play in her little pool. Mina made a great lunch, and my peach cobbler turned out pretty good. Though I may want to adjust the recipe somewhat. Enabled the backend server for the baby monitor UI, and it seems to work as long as the IP address is fixed. I going to fix the IP for the baby monitor along with other devices, hopefully getting around the issue with the IP address ...

Had a relaxing morning with Mina. Parisa keeps saying 'OK' and 'Oh No', and it is very cute. Replaced RPi for baby monitor so that we can use the USB microphone again. Having an issue with the assigned IP address flopping between two values after each reboot. Need to check if commands in the Web UI still work. Made the base for a peach cobbler this evening. I will make the batter in the morning, before my parents come out for Canada Day. ...

I had the day off today, but I was still running around. Dropped off and picked up Parisa at daycare. Stopped at Home Depot for items we needed, but had to go back to return an item and get missing items. Replaced furnance filter, glued cracks in stipple ceiling in our bedroom. Also washed diaper pail twice. Prepared hamburger patties for dinner, then freezing them. The addition of the Parmesano, Pecorino and ground dried Porcini mushrooms made them really tasty. Grilled peaches, sprinkling ...

Visited family this weekend, and had a great time. Got to see my nephew in person for the first time, and Parisa had a great time with everyone. Salvaged several high voltage capacitors from an old TV PCB my father was tossing out. ...

Soldered female header pins to esp32-cam programming board. Had to add my account to dialout group and install pyserial. Forgot to mention I went on a bike ride yesterday. Going to see the family tomorrow, including my nephew Adam for the first time in person. ...

Did not solder the esp32-cam programming board, or work on the roguelike tutorial. ...

The esp32-cam programming board arrived, but I will have to solder the female headers tomorrow. Worked on updated python roguelike tutorial. ...

Got a haircut after three months of the Covid-19 lock-down. Worked on the updated python roguelike tutorial. ...

Worked on the updated python roguelike tutorial, and also had some corrections for Peter's resume. ...

Did some yard work this morning, then rushed inside to make my focaccia I was planning on making. The focaccia turned out quite well. Helped my brother-in-law get his charcoal BBQ going, so he could make our annual kabob dinner. The kabob was delicious, but it maybe the last time we get to use his BBQ (the rust has spread everywhere). Peter also told me he is applying for a new job, but not where I am currently working. Hopefully he finds a place where he will be happier, and appreciated. ...

Wished Peter a happy birthday. During our weekly chats, he gave me access to his media server so I can download tv shows/movies to watch. I started to organize the folders in my projects directory, and I also resumed the revised python tcod tutorial. ...

Finally got a hold of an old friend who had seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown. Invited him out for a BBQ at our place in two weeks, should be fun! ...

Finished migrating over to the a newer version of Ubuntu on a SSD. I had to re-install chrome for some reason. I also removed the dummy account, and mounted remaining partitions and external drives. Still need to install a few program, and possibly remove the old Ubuntu on the other partition, but I will save that for another day. ...

Moved the boot-loader to the /boot partition of the SSD, copied over the home directory for the dummy user, mapped the home partition and the home backup, created my user and pointed to the old home partition. Still need to fix UID and GID for my account, but I will see if it all works after a reboot. ...

Thought of a neat idea for a video game map topology: Mobius Strips. So traversing the map in one direction twice will return to the same room. Another idea would be to use holes that would allow access to the opposite side of the Mobius map. This could be combined with barriers to create challenges. ...

Went for a bike ride with college from my current job, who also worked at my old job. Learned a few things about how things were done in DevOps at my old job. Scary. Cut the lawn the other day, so a decent weekend of physical activity. Still need to settle on a plan of action to migrate my home partition to my new Ubuntu installation. ...

Made a backup of my old home directory, but since I have already created a user with my prefered username, I may have to do some administrative shuffling. Namely renaming the current user to a temporary name, create a new useriwith desired username and point to home directory to old home directory on separate partition. I would just like to mount the partition more cleanly before proceeding. I also freed up some swap on the SSD since there already exists a /swap partition on a separate drive. ...

Installed most of the remaining programs in the newer version of Ubuntu. I was hoping to avoid copying over all my files and dot files/folders from my current home directory, but it seems that is the only way. ...

Relaxed before my day off, I wish I had taken the Friday off instead of Thursday. ...

Still have not installed remaning applications for Ubuntu. I did start to estimate the cost of parts for an activity centre from Digikey. ...

I got two votes of confidence today, one from a college and the other from my manager. I was worried that I was not performing my job as quickly or as well as I should, but both re-assured me that I was doing well and even praised my thoroughness. ...

I got two votes of confidence today, one from a college and the other from my manager. I was worried that I was not performing my job as quickly or as well as I should, but both re-assured me that I was doing well and even praised my thoroughness. ...

Created a python script to scrap this website to create a backup copy of these entries. The script in executed inside a docker container, which loads a local sqlite DB to keep the unique timestamped entries. The backup entries can be used to re-create the entries in a single massive record in the event that I do not log my work for a 30 days, and this site is purged. I need to create a script that generates that summary entry, and deletes the records used. I need to make sure the script is smart...

Today I was supposed to complete the install of software on my new Ubuntu installation, but that did not happen. ...