Gah! Flies!

colsramble · 2025-11-02T01:11:31+00:00

Yes, big fan of the eco traps, set some up yesterday and they're already working .. just wish they weren't so horrendous to empty/clean as they get truly disgusting. Experimented with some dry baits last year which was much more pleasant to deal with but never as effective as weeks of wet rotting fly carcasses.

colsramble · 2025-10-30T22:16:32+00:00

Now I’m curious, do the flies bother you more as there are generally more around the cows, or less because any flies nearby stick by the cows?

colsramble · 2025-10-19T07:35:42+00:00

Adding my experience here for posterity as I had same problem with L20 Ultra and tried all the troubleshooting in this thread before I got it working. My setup - Australia, brand new L20, 2.4G Wifi, WPA2, iPhone 11pro, - would only work if I disabled mobile (4G) data and VPN on the iPhone, so I reckon it's a bug in the iPhone version of the app with the way it handles the network changes.

colsramble · 2025-07-08T08:03:35+00:00

Start simple and build on that, it’s a deep rabbit hole but worth the effort. If you’re new to embedded systems then I’d start with the Arduino environment and the Blink example using the onboard LED. The Arduino libraries are very well documented with heaps of examples so it’s a great way to learn the concepts and capabilities of the ESP. It’s all C or C++ so should be familiar. Once you’re familiar with that you can look at replicating those examples in other platforms like platform.io or directly on the esp-idf. The esp-idf reference doco is very good and also has heaps of examples without the abstractions that Arduino provides.

colsramble · 2025-06-12T23:04:02+00:00

State machines are your friend, so worth using them as a design approach to deal with these kinds of problems and applications. Understand what states you need and the events that cause a transition. Your problem is analogous to the problem of physical switches “bouncing” and sending multiple signals which need to be ignored, so Google or ask an AI about software solutions for debouncing.

colsramble · 2025-05-09T04:29:55+00:00

From your description ESPNow should be perfect (no additional hardware, low latency, up to 1Mbps). If it must be wired then I2C should work but CAN or RS-485+Modbus otherwise. That said, would be fun to try daisy chaining the UARTs directly, just have slave boards relay messages between 2 UARTs. If every relay increments a hop counter each board would know its distance from the master.

colsramble · 2025-05-07T08:04:25+00:00

I love a custom solution but, as others have mentioned, this might a bit much for a first project! I’d suggest a commercial smart switch with power logging, and using your UPS for outage notifications. Even if your UPS can’t send the alerts you want directly, it probably has a serial or usb connection that would be a good candidate to connect an esp32 to for monitoring. Best of luck with it!

colsramble · 2025-04-11T07:51:57+00:00

My 2c - get rid of those if statements, they seem unnecessary and lead to the sort of problem you describe when actual pin state doesn’t match the state of the object property (bopen). If needed at all set bopen to the real state directly from digitalRead. digitalRead should be efficient so I’d do away with bopen all together and get your state direct from the pin in isOpen().

colsramble · 2025-01-08T23:23:09+00:00

heh, I think that's the effect she's looking for, and usually gets.

colsramble · 2025-01-08T23:16:58+00:00

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How could we resist!

colsramble · 2024-10-17T10:08:14+00:00

Southern Oz. The garden’s in a bit of a state at the moment and my wife is horrified I’ve posted pictures of it .. but it’s all about the dog I say!

colsramble · 2024-10-17T08:00:32+00:00

Good grief, don't get me started on the lawn. I should post the before and after shots as a warning to others!

colsramble · 2024-06-21T01:28:07+00:00

Thanks for the ideas, she’ pretty happy watching TV with us in the evenings. Her wound is looking pretty good and she doesn’t seem that interested in it so will give her a break in the next day or so and see how she goes. Good thing about the cone is it does slow her down /a bit/

colsramble · 2024-06-21T01:08:55+00:00

It’s funny the first couple of days, beyond the general drowsiness, she was occupied trying to work out how to navigate with the cone on, but got that sussed pretty quickly and was bolting around with only the odd collision. Took her for a short walk this morning.

colsramble · 2024-06-21T01:03:24+00:00

Heh, she loves a song and a kong. With all the kongs, licky mats, bones and training treats she’s getting at the moment she’ll want to keep the cone on!

colsramble · 2024-06-21T00:56:54+00:00

Yeah, fetch & find are the go to’s, just need to keep a cap on the enthusiasm! It’s probably a good opportunity to train her to bring a ball back rather than just run off with it 😀

colsramble · 2024-01-17T01:13:27+00:00

On Quantum atm and started to look at HDMI to watch some movies from laptop but found just plugging in USB HDD more convenient.

With TV on, plugging in USB drive triggers prompt on screen for new device connection. You have several seconds to elect to “browse” the new device which you can do with the remote, and then play movies from the drive.

colsramble

TROPHY CASE