Three D's of 3D Printing in 2022

I've been somewhat fascinated with 3D printing ever since becoming aware of it a decade ago, but it was prohibitively expensive to get into it when machines were in the four-digit USD$ range and seemed likely to be limited to somewhat-unreliably producing useless tchotchkes at vastly higher cost. Things have changed. A lot.

Declining costs

Cost of entry
My new(ish) printer is the Cocoon Create Modelmaker, a respin/reskin of the Wanhao i3 Mini - which if you follow the links, you'll note is USD$199 brand new, but I got mine second-hand on eBay for AUD$100. I'm a sucker for an eBay bargain. When I picked it up, the seller (who was upgrading to a model with a larger print bed) also gave me a crash course in printing and then threw in an almost-full 300m spool of filament to get me started - another AUD$20 saved. So I'm already at the f*@k it point as far as up-front investment goes.

Cost of materials
I'm picking up 300m rolls of PLA filament from eBay for AUD$20-$24 delivered, and I'm choosing local suppliers so they typically get delivered within 3 days. I could go even cheaper if I used Chinese suppliers. The biggest thing I've printed so far was a case for my Raspberry Pi 3B+, part of a 19" rack mount setup (I'm also a sucker for anything rackmounted) - that took 21 hours and used about 95c of filament. So really, it's starting to approach "free to make" as long as you don't place too much value on your own time...

Damn Fine Software

Seven years ago, Scott Hanselman documented his early experiences with 3D printing; there was a lot of rage and frustration. Maybe I've just been lucky, maybe buying a printer that had already been used, tweaked, and enhanced (with 3d-printed upgrade parts) was a galaxy-brain genius move, but honestly, I've had very little trouble, and I'd estimate less than 50c of material has ended up in the bin. Happy with that. I think the tools have moved on supremely in that time, and awesomely, they're all FREE and most are also Open-Source.

Cura
Ultimaker Cura takes an STL file and "slices" it into something your actual hardware can print, via a G-Code file. It's analogous to the JVM taking generic Java bytecodes and translating them to x86 machine language or whatever. Anyway, it does a great job, and it's free.

OctoPrint
My first 3D printing "toolchain" consisted of me slicing in Cura on my Mac followed by saving the file to a micro SD card (via an adapter), then turning around to place the (unsheathed) micro SD card into my printer's front-panel slot, and instructing it to print. This was fine, but the "sneakernet"-like experience was annoying (I kept losing the SD adapter) and the printer made a huge racket being on a table in the middle of the room. Then I discovered OctoPrint, an open-source masterpiece that network-enables any compatible 3D printer with a USB port. I pressed my otherwise-idle 5-series Intel NUC into service and it's been flawless, allowing me to wirelessly submit jobs to the printer, which now resides in a cupboard, reducing noise and increasing temperature stability (which is good for print quality)

Tinkercad
It didn't take long for me to want a little more than what Thingiverse et al could provide. Thingiverse's "Remix" culture is just awesome - a hardware equivalent to open-sourced software - but my experience of CAD was limited to a semester in university bashing up against Autodesk's AutoCAD, so I figured it would just be too hard for a hobbyist like me to create new things. Then I discovered Tinkercad, a free web application by, of all companies, Autodesk! This app features one of the best tutorial introductions I've ever seen; truly, I could get my 10-year old daughter productive in this software thanks to that tutorial. And the whole thing being on the web makes it portable and flexible. Massive kudos to Autodesk for this one.

Do It

The useless tchotchke era is over; I've been using my printer to replace lost board game tokens, organise cables, rackmount loose devices, and create LEGO parts that don't exist yet. As far as I'm concerned it's virtually paid for itself already, and I'm still getting better as a designer and operator of the machine. If you've been waiting for the right time to pounce, I strongly recommend picking up a used 3D printer and giving it a whirl.

AWS Step Functions - a pretty-good v1.0

I've been using Amazon's Step Functions functionality a fair bit at work recently, as a way to orchestrate and visualise a migration process that involves some Extract-Transform-Load steps and various other bits, each one being an AWS Lambda.

On the whole, it's been pretty good - it's fun to watch the process chug along with the flowchart-like UI automagically updating (I can't show you any screenshots unfortunately, but it's neat). There have been a couple of reminders however that this is a version 1.0 product, namely:

Why can't I resume where I failed before?

With our ETL process, frequently we'll detect a source data problem in the Extract or Transform stages. It would be nice if after fixing the data in place, we could go back to the failed execution and just ask it to resume at the failed step, with all of the other "state" from the execution intact.

Similarly, if we find a bug in our Extract or Transform lambdas themselves, it's super-nice to be able to monkey-patch them right there and then (remembering of course to update the source code in Git as well) - but it's only half as nice as it could be. If we could fix the broken lambda code and then re-run the execution that uncovered the bug, the cycle time would be outstanding

Why can't you remember things for me?

Possibly-related to the first point, is the disappointing discovery that Step Functions have no "memory" or "context" if you prefer, where you can stash a variable for use later in the pipeline. That is you might expect to be able to declare 3 steps like this:

    Extract Lambda
      Inputs:
        accountId
      Outputs: 
        pathToExtractedDataBucket
        
    Transform Lambda
       Inputs:
         pathToExtractedDataBucket
       Outputs:
         pathToTransformedDataBucket
         
    Load Lambda
       Inputs:
         accountId
         pathToTransformedDataBucket
       Outputs:
         isSuccessful
  

But unfortunately that simply will not work (at time of writing, November 2022). The above pipeline will fail at runtime because accountId has not been passed through the Transform lambda in order for the Load lambda to receive it!

For me, this really makes a bit of a mockery of the reusability and composability of lambdas with step functions. To fix the situation above, we have to make the Extract Lambda emit the accountId and Transform Lambda aware of and pass through accountId even though it has no interest in, or need for it!; that is:

   Extract Lambda
      Inputs:
        accountId
      Outputs: 
        accountId
        pathToExtractedDataBucket
        
    Transform Lambda
       Inputs:
         accountId
         pathToExtractedDataBucket
       Outputs:
         accountId
         pathToTransformedDataBucket
         
    Load Lambda
       Inputs:
         accountId
         pathToTransformedDataBucket
       Outputs:
         isSuccessful
  

That's really not good in my opinion, and makes for a lot of unwanted cluttering-up of otherwise reusable lambdas, dealing with arguments that they don't care about, just because some other entity needs them. Fingers crossed this will be rectified soon, as I'm sure I'm not the first person to have been very aggravated by this design.

Dispatchables Part 3; Make It So

In the previous part of this series about implementing a "dispatchable" for solar-efficient charging of (AA and AAA) batteries, I'd worked out that with a combination of the Google Assistant's Energy Storage trait (made visible through the openHAB Google Assistant Charger integration) and a small amount of local state, it looked like in theory, I could achieve my aim of a voice-commanded (and -queryable) system that would allow efficient charging for a precise amount of time. Let's now see if we can turn theory into practice.

First step is to copy all the configuration from the openHAB Charger device type into an items file:

$OPENHAB_CONF/items/dispatchable.items

Group  chargerGroup 
{ ga="Charger" [ isRechargeable=true, unit="SECONDS" ] }

Switch chargingItem         (chargerGroup) 
{ ga="chargerCharging" }

Switch pluggedInItem        (chargerGroup) 
{ ga="chargerPluggedIn" }

Number capacityRemainItem   (chargerGroup) 
{ ga="chargerCapacityRemaining" }

Number capacityFullItem     (chargerGroup) 
{ ga="chargerCapacityUntilFull" }

You'll note the only alterations I made was to change the unit to SECONDS as that's the best fit for our timing system, and a couple of renames for clarity. Here's what they're all representing:

• chargingItem: are the batteries being charged at this instant?
• pluggedInItem: has a human requested that batteries be charged?
• capacityRemainSecondsItem: how many seconds the batteries have been charging for
• capacityFullSecondsItem: how many seconds of charging remain

I could have used the "proper" dead timer pattern of saying "any non-zero capacityFullSecondsItem indicates intent" but given the Charger type requires all four variables to be implemented anyway, I went for a crisper definition. It also helps with the rule-writing as we'll shortly see.

If we look at the openHAB UI at this point we'll just have a pile of NULL values for all these items:

Now it's time to write some rules that will get sensible values into them all. There are four in total, and I'll explain each one in turn rather than dumping a wall of code.

Rule 1: Only charge if it's wanted, AND if we have power to spare

$OPENHAB_CONF/rules/dispatchable.rules

rule "Make charging flag true if wanted and in power surplus"
when
  Item currentPowerUsage changed 
then
  if (pluggedInItem.state == ON) {
    if (currentPowerUsage.state > 0|W) {
      logInfo("dispatchable", "[CPU] Non-zero power usage");
      chargingItem.postUpdate(OFF);
    } else {
      logInfo("dispatchable", "[CPU] Zero power usage");
      chargingItem.postUpdate(ON);
    }
  } 
end

This one looks pretty similar to the old naïve rule we had way back in version 1.0.0, and it pretty-much is. We've just wrapped it with the "intent" check (pluggedInItem) to make sure we actually need to do something, and offloaded the hardware control elsewhere. Which brings us to...

Rule 2: Make the hardware track the state of chargingItem

$OPENHAB_CONF/rules/dispatchable.rules

rule "Charge control toggled - drive hardware" 
when
  Item chargingItem changed to ON or
  Item chargingItem changed to OFF
then
  logInfo("dispatchable", "[HW] Charger: " + chargingItem.state);
  SP2_Power.sendCommand(chargingItem.state.toString());
end

The simplest rule of all, it's a little redundant but it does prevent hardware control "commands" getting mixed up with software state "updates".

Rule 3: Allow charging to be requested and cancelled

$OPENHAB_CONF/rules/dispatchable.rules

rule "Charge intent toggled (pluggedIn)" 
when
  Item pluggedInItem changed
then
  if (pluggedInItem.state == ON) {
    // Human has requested charging 
    logInfo("dispatchable", "[PIN] charge desired for: ");
    logInfo("dispatchable", capacityFullSecondsItem.state + "s");
    capacityRemainSecondsItem.postUpdate(0);
    // If possible, begin charging immediately:
    if (currentPowerUsage.state > 0|W) {
      logInfo("dispatchable", "[PIN] Awaiting power-neutrality");
    } else {
      logInfo("dispatchable", "[PIN] Beginning charging NOW");
      chargingItem.postUpdate(ON);
    }
  } else {
    logInfo("dispatchable", "[PIN] Cancelling charging");
    // Clear out all state
    capacityFullSecondsItem.postUpdate(0);
    capacityRemainSecondsItem.postUpdate(0);
    chargingItem.postUpdate(OFF);
  }
end

This rule is where things start to get a little trickier, but it's pretty straightforward. The key thing is setting or resetting the three other variables to reflect the user's intent.

If charging is desired we assume that the "how long for" variable has already been set correctly and zero the "how long have you been charging for" counter. Then, if the house is already power-neutral, we start. Otherwise we wait for conditions to be right (Rule 1).
If charging has been cancelled we can just clear out all our state. The hardware will turn off almost-immediately because of Rule 2.

Rule 4: Keep timers up-to-date

$OPENHAB_CONF/rules/dispatchable.rules

rule "Update charging timers"
when
  Time cron "0 0/1 * * * ?"
then
  if (pluggedInItem.state == ON) {
    // Charging has been requested
    if (chargingItem.state == ON) {
      // We're currently charging
      var secLeft = capacityFullSecondsItem.state as Number - 60; 
      capacityFullSecondsItem.postUpdate(secLeft);
      logInfo("dispatchable", "[CRON] " + secLeft + "s left");
      
      var inc = capacityRemainSecondsItem.state as Number + 60; 
      capacityRemainSecondsItem.postUpdate(inc);

      // Check for end-charging condition:
      if (secLeft <= 0) {
        // Same as if user hit cancel:
        logInfo("dispatchable", "[CRON] Reached target.");
        pluggedInItem.postUpdate(OFF);
      }
    } 
  } 
end

This last rule runs once a minute, but only does anything if the user asked for charging AND we're doing so. If that's the case, we decrement the time left" by 60 seconds, and conversely increase the "how long have they been charging for" by 60 seconds. Yes, I know this might not be strictly accurate but it's good enough for my needs.

The innermost if statement checks for the happy-path termination condition - we've hit zero time left! - and toggles the flag which will once-again lower the intent flag, thus causing Rule 3 to fire, which in turn will cause Rule 2 to fire, and turn off the hardware.

UI Setup

This has ended up being quite the journey, and we haven't even got the Google integration going yet! The last thing for this installment is to knock up a quick control/status UI so that we can see that it actually works correctly. Here's what I've got in my openHAB "Overview" page:

The slider is wired to capacityFullSecondsItem, with a range of 0 - 21600 (6 hours) in 60-second increments, and 6 "steps" marked on the slider corresponding to integer numbers of hours for convenience. The toggle is wired to pluggedInItem. When I want to charge some batteries, I pull the slider to my desired charge time and flip the switch. Here's a typical example of what I get in the logs if I do this during a sunny day:

[PIN] charge desired for: 420 seconds
[PIN] Beginning charging immediately
[HW] Charger: ON
[CRON] 360s left
...
[CRON] 120s left
[CRON] 60s left
[CRON] 0s left
[CRON] Reached desired charge. Stopping
[PIN] Cancelling charging
[HW] Charger: OFF

Dispatchables Part 2; Computer, enhance!

As usual with software, Dispatchables v1.0.0 wasn't ideal. In fact, it didn't really capture the "Dispatchable" idea at all. What if I don't have any batteries that need charging? Wouldn't it be better to only enable the charger if there was actually charging work to be done? And for how long? We need a way to specify intent.

Here's what I'd like to be able to tell the charging system:

• I have flat batteries in the charger
• I want them to be charged for a total of {x} hours

To me, that looks like a perfect job for a voice-powered Google Assistant integration. Let's go!

Googlification phase 1

First, let's equip our Broadlink smart power socket item with the required ga attribute so we can control it via the openHAB Google Assistant Action.

$OPENHAB_CONF/items/powerpoints.items:

Switch SP2_Power "Battery Charger Power" { 
  channel="broadlink:sp2:34-ea-34-84-86-d1:powerOn", 
  ga="Switch" 
}

If I go through the setup steps in the Google Assistant app on my phone, I can now see "Battery Charger Power" as a controllable device. And sure enough, I can say "Hey Google, turn on the battery charger" and it all works. Great!

Now, we need to add something to record the intent to perform battery-charging when solar conditions allow, and something else that will track the number of minutes the charger has been on for, since the request was made. Note that this may well be over multiple distinct periods, for example if I ask for 6 hours of charging but there's only one hour of quality daylight left in the day, I would expect the "dispatch" to be resumed the next day once conditions were favourable again. Once we've hit the desired amount of charging, the charger should be shut off and the "intent" marker reset to OFF. Hmmm... 🤔

Less state === Better state

Well, my first optimisation on the way to solving this is to streamline the state. I absolutely do not need to hold multiple distinct but highly-related bits of information:

• Intent to charge
• Desired charge duration
• Amount of time remaining in this dispatch

... that just looks like an OOP beginner's first try at a domain object. Huh. Remember Java Beans? Ugh.

We can actually do it all with one variable, the Dead Timer "pattern" (if you can call it such a thing) I learnt from an embedded developer (in C) almost 20 years ago:

  unsigned int warning_led_timer = 0;

  /* Inside main loop, being executed once per second */
  
  while (warning_led_timer > 0) {
    warning_led_timer--;
    
    /* Enable the LED, or turn it off if no longer needed */
    enable_led(WARNING_LED, warning_led_timer > 0);
  }
  
  /* ...
  * Somewhere else in the code that needs to show
  * the warning LED for 3 seconds
  */
  warning_led_timer = 3;

It encapsulates:

• intent - anyone setting the timer to a non-zero value
• desired duration - the initial non-zero value
• duration remaining - whatever value the variable is currently holding; and
• termination - when the variable hits zero

Funny that a single well-utilised variable in C (of all things) can actually achieve one of the stated goals of OO (encapsulation) isn't it? All depends on your point of view I guess. Okay. Let's step back a little bit and see what we can do here.

Objectives

What I'd like to be able to do is have this conversation with the Google Assistant:

Hey Google, charge the batteries for five hours
"Okay, I'll charge the batteries for five hours"

... with all the underlying "dispatchable" stuff I've talked about being done transparently. And for bonus points:

Hey Google, how much charge time remaining?
"There are three hours and 14 minutes remaining"

So as it turns out, the Google Assistant has an Energy Storage trait which should allow the above voice commands (or similar) to work, as it can be mapped into the openHAB Charger Device Type. It's all starting to come together - I don't have a "smart charger" (i.e. for an electric vehicle) but I think I can simulate having one using my "dead timer"!

"Dispatchables" with OpenHAB and PowerPal

I read a while back about the concept of "dispatchable" energy sources - namely, ones that can be brought on- or off-stream at virtually no notice, at a desired output level. As an enthusiastic solar-power owner/operator, the idea of tuning my energy consumption to also be dispatchable, suited to the output of my rooftop solar cells, makes a lot of sense.

My first tiny exploration into this field will use OpenHAB to automate "dispatch" of a non-time-critical task: recharging some batteries, to a time that makes best use of the "free" solar energy coming from my roof.

Just to be clear, I'm referring to charging domestic AA and AAA batteries here; I'm not trying to run a PowerWall!

OMG PPRO REST API FTW

To get the necessary insight into whether my house is running "in surplus" power, I'm using my PowerPal PRO which offers a simple RESTful API. If you send off a GET with suitable credentials to

https://readings.powerpal.net/api/v1/device/{{SERIAL_NUMBER}}

you get something like:

{
    "serial_number": "000abcde",
    "total_meter_reading_count": 443693,
    "pruned_meter_reading_count": 0,
    "total_watt_hours": 4246285,
    "total_cost": 1380.9539,
    "first_reading_timestamp": 1627948800,
    "last_reading_timestamp": 1659495300,
    "last_reading_watt_hours": 0,
    "last_reading_cost": 0.00062791666,
    "available_days": 364,
    "first_archived_date": "2021-04-13",
    "last_archived_date": "2022-08-02"
}

It's pretty straightforward to translate that into an openHAB Thing definition using the HTTP Binding that will get us the current watt-hours reading every 60 seconds (which is how often the device phones home)

$OPENHAB_CONF/things/powerpal.thing:

Thing http:url:powerpal "PowerPal" [
  baseURL="https://readings.powerpal.net",
  headers="Authorization=MyPowerPalAPIKey", 
    "Accept=application/json",
  timeout=2000,
  bufferSize=1024,
  refresh=60] {
    Channels:
      Type number : powerUsage "Newest Power Usage" 
      [ stateExtension="/api/v1/device/000abcde", 
      stateTransformation="JSONPATH:$.last_reading_watt_hours", 
      mode="READONLY" ]
}

You can get MyPowerPalAPIKey as used above, by opening the PowerPal mobile app and going to Guidance -> Generate an API Key.

That's it for the "physical" (Thing) layer. Lets move up the stack and define an Item that we can work with in a Rule.

$OPENHAB_CONF/items/powerpal.items:

Number:Power currentPowerUsage "Current Power Usage [%d W]" 
  {channel="http:url:powerpal:powerUsage"}

... and if you're me, nothing will happen, and you will curse openHAB and its constant changes. Make sure you've actually got the HTTP Binding installed or it'll all just silently fail. I wasn't able to see the list of Official Bindings because of some weird internal issue. So I had to do a full sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade openhab before I could get it.

Then, fun times ensued because the PowerPal API uses a slightly-strange way of providing authentication, which didn't fit very well with how the HTTP binding wants to do it. I had to go spelunking through the binding's source code to figure out how to specify the Authorization header myself.

Now we can finally get to the "home automation bus" bit of openHAB ... we define a rule that's watching for power usage changes, and triggers my Broadlink SP2 smart power switch on or off depending on whether we're net-zero.

$OPENHAB_CONF/rules/dispatchable.rules:

rule "Charge batteries if in power surplus"
when
  Item housePowerUsage changed 
then
  logInfo("dispatchable", "Power: " + housePowerUsage.state);

  if (SP2_Power.state === ON && housePowerUsage.state > 0|W) {
    logInfo("dispatchable", "Charger -> OFF");
    SP2_Power.sendCommand(OFF);
  }
  if (SP2_Power.state === OFF && housePowerUsage.state == 0|W) {
    logInfo("dispatchable", "Charger -> ON");
    SP2_Power.sendCommand(ON);
  }
end

And we're all done!

What's that weird |W stuff? that's an inline conversion to a Number:Power object, so that comparisons can be performed - a necessary, if slightly awkward aspect of openHAB's relatively-new "Units Of Measurement" feature.

What does it look like? Here's the logs from just after 9am:

09:06:37 [dispatchable] - Power: 3 W
09:07:37 [dispatchable] - Power: 2 W
09:08:37 [dispatchable] - Power: 3 W
09:09:37 [dispatchable] - Power: 2 W
09:12:37 [dispatchable] - Power: 3 W
09:13:37 [dispatchable] - Power: 2 W
09:16:37 [dispatchable] - Power: 1 W
09:18:37 [dispatchable] - Power: 0 W
09:18:37 [dispatchable] - Charger -> ON

So the query to PowerPal is obviously running on the 37th second of each minute. There are "missing" entries because we're only logging anything when the power figure has changed. You can see the panels gradually creating more power as the sun's incident angle/power improves, until finally at 9:18, we hit power neutrality and the charger is turned on. Not bad.

The bizarre world of cheap iPhone accessories

Recently I purchased a couple of extremely-cheap Lightning-to-3.5mm headphone socket adaptors on eBay, primarily so I can use a pair of quality over-ear headphones rather than the in-ear Apple buds which I find uncomfortable.

These adaptors come in at under AUD$5 including shipping, putting them at one-third the cost of the genuine Apple accessory. They arrived within 2 days and I was all set to put them to work and feel superior at my money-saving (smug-and-play?), except ... they didn't work.

The adaptor would chirpily announce "Power on!" in my headphones, but then there was no further indication that the iPhone had "seen" them at all. And this was the case for both adaptors I'd purchased.

I was all set to fire off an angry complaint to the eBay seller and get a refund, when I noticed something ... odd ... on the listing:

Why would these Lightning accessories "include Bluetooth support"? Just for fun, I turned on my iPhone's Bluetooth (which I usually leave turned off for battery-saving and anti-h@X0r reasons)...

"Connected!" says the chirpy voice.

OH

MY

GOD

So it turns out that these cheap cables are cheap because they don't bother getting certified as "Made for iPhone" by Apple. A "compliant" Lightning device must have some kind of ID in its handshake with the phone, which the phone checks for legitimacy.

So instead, the very clever, very sneaky makers of these cables just use the DC power provided on Lightning pins 1 and 5 to drive a Bluetooth audio interface chip, which doesn't have the same "Made for iPhone" hurdles. The phone doesn't even realise there's a device hanging off there, so there's no way it can check if it's compliant!

Full marks for ingenuity, but I think I'm going to go to an Apple Store and get the real deal. Audio over Bluetooth is quality-compromised, plus this solution uses much more power and I prefer to leave my Bluetooth OFF for the aforementioned reasons. Still - I won't need to return them to the eBay seller - they *do* work and I'll keep them around for backup purposes.

Introducing ... Cardle!

UPDATE [July 2023] - I've let the cardle.xyz domain expire after a year, but you can still play the game over at cardle.themillhousegroup.com

Yes, it's yet-another Wordle clone, this time about cars:

https://www.cardle.xyz

Like so many other fans of Wordle, I'd been wanting to try doing a nice self-contained client-side game like this, and after trying the Australian Rules player version of Wordle, Worpel (named after a player), I saw a pattern that I could use. Worpel uses "attributes" of an AFL player like their height, playing position, and team, and uses the Wordle "yellow tile" convention to show if you're close in a certain attribute. For example, if the team is not correct, but it is from the correct Australian state. Or if the player's height is within 3 centimetres of the target player's.

After a bit of head-scratching I came up with the 5 categories that I figured would be challenging but with enough possibilities for the "yellow tile" to be helpful. There's no point having a category that can only be right (green tile) or wrong (black tile). The least-useful is probably the "model name" category but of course that is vital to the game, and having played the game literally hundreds of times now, it has on occasion proved useful to know that a certain character appears in the target car's name (obviously cars like the Mazda 6 are hugely helpful here!)

It has been a while since I last did a publicly-visible web side-project, and I wanted to see what the landscape was like in 2022. The last time I published a dynamic website it was on the Heroku platform, which is still pretty good, but I think there are better options these days. After a bit of a look around I settled on Netlify, and so far they've delivered admirably - fast, easy-to-configure and free!

There has been some criticism bandied about for create-react-app recently, saying it's a bad starting point, but for me it was a no-brainer. I figure not having to know how to optimally configure webpack just leaves me more brain-space to devote to making the game a bit better. So without any further ado, I'd like to showcase some of my favourite bits of the app.

Tile reveal animation

Wordle is outstanding in its subtle but highly-effective animations that give it a really polished feel, but I really didn't want to have to use a Javascript animation library to get a few slick-looking animations. The few libraries I've tried in the past have been quite heavy in both bundle-size and intrusiveness into the code. I had a feeling I could get what I wanted with a suitable CSS keyframes animation of a couple of attributes, and after some experimenting, I was happy with this:

      @keyframes fade-in {
        from {
          opacity: 0;
          transform:scale(0.5)
        }
        50%  { 
          transform:scale(1.2); 
          opacity: 0.5; 
        }
        to {
          opacity: 1;
          transform:scale(1.0)
        }
      }

I really like the "over-bulge" effect before it settles back down to the correct size. The pure-CSS solution for a gradual left-to-right "reveal" once a guess has been entered worked out even better I think. Certainly a lot less fiddly than doing it in Javascript:

.BoxRow :nth-child(1) {
  animation: fade-in 200ms;
}
.BoxRow :nth-child(2) {
  animation: fade-in 400ms;
}
.BoxRow :nth-child(3) {
  animation: fade-in 600ms;
}
.BoxRow :nth-child(4) {
  animation: fade-in 800ms;
}
.BoxRow :nth-child(5) {
  animation: fade-in 1000ms;
}

Those different times are the amount of time the animation should take to run - giving it the "sweeping" effect I was after:

Mobile-first

As developers we get far too used to working on our own, fully up-to-date, desktop, browser of choice. But a game like this is far more likely to be played on a mobile device. So I made a concerted effort to test as I went both with my desktop Chrome browser simulating various mobile screens and on my actual iPhone 8. Using an actual device threw up a number of subtle issues that the desktop simulation couldn't possibly hope to replicate (and nor should it try) like the extraordinarily quirky stuff you have to do to share to the clipboard on iOS and subtleties of font sizing. It was worth it when my beta-testing crew complimented me on how well it looked and played on their phones.

Performance

The site gets 98 for mobile performance (on slow 4G) and 100 for desktop from PageSpeed, which I'm pretty chuffed about. I spent a lot of time messing around with Google Fonts and then FontSource trying to get a custom sans-serif font to be performant, before just giving up and going with "whatever you've got", i.e.:

font-family: 'Segoe UI', 'Roboto', 'Oxygen',
          'Ubuntu', 'Cantarell', 'Fira Sans', 'Droid Sans', 'Helvetica Neue',
          sans-serif;

... sometimes it's just not worth the fight.

The other "trick" I did was relocating a ton of CSS from the various ComponentName.css files in src right into a <style> block right in the head of index.html. This allows the browser to get busy rendering the header (which I also pulled out of React-land), bringing the "first contentful paint" time down appreciably. Obviously this is not something you'd want to be doing while you're in "active development" mode, but it doesn't have to be a nightmare - for example, in this project I made good use of CSS Variables for the first time, and I define a whole bunch of them in that style block and then reference them in ComponentName.css to ensure consistency.

Automating heating vents with openHAB, esp8266 and LEGO - Part 3; Firmware intro

Continuing to work up the stack from my LEGO physical vent manipulator(V1), (V2), I decided to do something new for the embedded control software part of this solution and employ an Expressif ESP8266-based chipset and an accompanying L293D H-bridge daughterboard, primarily because they are just ridiculously cheap.

It took a little bit of finessing to find out exactly what to search eBay for (try ESP-12E + L293D) but listings like this, for AUD$12.55 including postage are simply incredible value. That's an 80MHz processor, motor driver board, USB cable and motor cable, all for less than I probably paid for the serial cable I would have used for my primitive robotics exercises back in university. Absolutely extraordinary.

As this setup uses the "NodeMCU" framework, it can be developed in the Arduino Studio IDE that I've used previously for Arduino experiments, in Arduino's C++-esque language that is simultaneously familiar, but also not ...

But I digress. The real trick with this board package is deducing from the non-existent documentation, exactly what you have and how it's meant to be used. For this particular combination, it's a "Node MCU 1.0 (ESP-12E Module)" that is accessed by using the CP210x "USB to UART" port driver available here. Once you've got the board installed, you can browse example code that should work perfectly for your hardware under File -> Examples -> Examples for NodeMCU 1.0. There's a generous selection here, all the way from "Blink" (which, as the "Hello World" of hardware, should always be the first sketch your hardware runs) all the way to "ESP8266WebServer" - which unsurprisingly ended up being the perfect jumping-off point for my own firmware.

After a frustrating and time-consuming detour getting the device to join my WiFi network (it transpires that the "Scan" sketch can find the SSIDs of 802.11b/g/n networks, but to actually connect, it's far better to be on 802.11n-only) it was time to drive some output, which meant more Googling to determine exactly how the L293D "Motor Driver Expansion Board" actually connects to the ESP's GPIO, and what that means in terms of software configuration.

Eventually I cobbled together the necessary knowledge from this board datasheet which talks about D1-D4, and the Arduino documentation for NodeMCU which indicates that these symbols should be magically available in my code. Then I took a tour through the ESP8266WebServer example code to find out what handler methods I had available. At last, I was ready to put it all together - as you'll see in the next blog post.

But before then, a cautionary tale - I fried both the motor shield board and an ESP board while developing this, and I suspect it was due to not being able to resist the temptation to run the whole thing off a single power supply. You can do this by moving this jumper to bridge the VIN (for the chip) pin to the VM (for the motor) pin. But I suspect the resulting exposure to back-EMF and all that grubby analogue stuff is not good for either the ESP chip nor the L293D motor driver on the shield board. You've been warned.

Use 2 separate power supplies here, or just one, but beware ...

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Putting the jumper across here allows using just one of the Vx/GND input pairs ...

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The L293D chip looking worse for wear, having overheated and/or died

(from the eBay listing) this should probably say maximise interference...

Automating heating vents with openHAB, esp8266 and LEGO - Part 2.5; Hardware rework

Working with hardware is fun; working with LEGO hardware is awesome. So before proceeding with the next part of my heating vent automation series, I took the opportunity to refine my vent manipulator, with the following aims:

• Quieter operation; v1 sounded like a coffee-grinder
• Faster movement; to sound like a quieter coffee-grinder for less time
• Lower stack height above floor level; to avoid impeding the sofa-bed mechanism directly overhead

V1 Hardware

As a reminder, here's the first hardware revision featuring a LEGO Technic XL motor and an extremely over-engineered - and tall - chassis.

V2 Hardware

Here's the respun version, which works as well as, if not better than, the original.

The changes:

• The chassis is half as high above the vent surface
• The rack-and-pinion mechanism is centered in the chassis to reduce torque
• The rack is situated lower to reduce flex
• The motor is reduced in size to a LEGO Technic "M" motor (quieter and faster)
• The manipulator clamps to the vent with a Technic pulley wheel instead of a brick, further reducing height-above-floor

Now we're in a really good position to get down-and-dirty with some firmware...

Things people have trouble with in React / Javascript, part 1: Too much React state

I've been on a bit of a Stack Overflow rampage recently, most commonly swooping in and answering questions/fixing problems people are having with their React apps. I'm going to spend my next few blog posts going over what seems to be giving people the most trouble in 2022.

Episode 1: In which things are overstated

This problem typically manifests itself as a question like "why doesn't my UI update" or the inverse "my UI is always updating" (which is almost always related to useEffect - see later in this series). With the useState hook, state management becomes so easy, it's tempting to just scatter state everywhere inside a component instead of thinking about whether it belongs there, or indeed if it's needed at all.

If I see more than 3 useState hooks in one component, I get nervous, and start looking for ways to:

• Derive the state rather than store it
• Push it up
• Pull it down

The React docs (and Dan Abramov himself) talk a lot about pulling-up and pushing-down state, but I think deriving state may actually be more important than either of those.

What do I mean? Well, I see people doing this:

    const [cars, setCars] = useState([]);
    const [preferredColor, setPreferredColor] = useState(undefined);
    const [preferredMaker, setPreferredMaker] = useState(undefined);
    // DON'T DO THIS:
    const [filteredCars, setFilteredCars] = useState([]);
    ...
  

Obviously I've left out tons of code where the list of cars is fetched and the UI is wired up, but honestly, you can already see the trouble brewing. The cars list and the filteredCars list are both held as React state. But filteredCars shouldn't be - it's the result of applying the user's selections (preferred color and maker) and so can be trivially calculated at render time. As soon as you realise this, all kinds of UI problems with staleness, flicker, and lag just melt away:

    const [cars, setCars] = useState([]);
    const [preferredColor, setPreferredColor] = useState(undefined);
    const [preferredMaker, setPreferredMaker= = useState(undefined);
    // Derive the visible list based on what we have and what we know
    const filteredCars = filterCars(cars, preferredColor, preferredMaker);
    ...
  

I think some people have trouble with their mental model around functional components, and are afraid to have a "naked const" sitting there in their function - somehow it's a hack or a lesser variable than one that useState handed you. Quite the reverse I think.

Another argument might be that it's "inefficient" to derive the data on each and every render. To that, I counter that if you are maintaining the cars and filteredCars lists properly (and this is certainly not guaranteed), then the number of renders should be exactly the same, and thus the amount of work being done is the same. However there's a strong chance that deriving-on-the-fly will actually save you unnecessary renders. I might keep using this car-filtering analogy through this series to explain why this is.

New Toy

I just received this from the good folk at PowerPal:

This is a cool device that basically should give me real-time API-based access to the power usage of my house. The next logical step for me is to then bundle it up into my openHAB setup. I'll probably begin with just using the HTTP binding to get what I need, and maybe (and it's a BIG maybe) turn it into a genuine binding at some point in the future. My experience trying to get the Broadlink binding merged into the openHAB addons codebase has turned me off that process a little...

2022 To-Do List

There's just never enough time and/or motivation to do all the things I've got on the back-burner, but some of these have been around for just too long. Hopefully listing them here (and ideally ticking them off with suitable links) will be motivating...

• The openHAB Broadlink Binding still hasn't been merged into the openHAB codebase. Every week it becomes harder - with such a busy upstream repository, with very exacting code-review standards, it's like nailing jelly to the wall ... of a moving train.
• frenzy.js my browser-based retro 8-bit arcade game has been rotting for years now. It needs a full React upgrade and some deep thought (or reading-up, or both) about some of the basic game algorithms (like collision-detection, for example)
• Tons of openHAB mini-projects to automate things around the house - blinds, heating vents, all sorts of stuff

Wish me luck...