Day 109, 110 - Still in Pendleton

Sunday (109) - This morning, I redid the last D1 Mini board onto a breadboard. The D1 Mini is on top, the buck converter is the middle, and the relay board is on the bottom. The 12VDC bus is on the left and 5VDC is on the right. The red and white wires on the lower left are to 12VDC power. I’m waiting for the Anderson PowerPole connectors to get here before installing the board into the compartment next to the passenger seat.

Later - We’ll, it turned out that I couldn’t wait. I pulled the panel and wired the relay across the step light switch so the switch still works as it originally did. But now, Home Assistant can override the switch. And the indicator light built into the switch still works! Not shown in the picture, but I added a wire from the Common relay terminal to the 12VDC bus and I added a zip-tie to keep the relay from moving.

We tried out to-go Thai food and it was wonderful. I think the one thing I have missed the most is being able to occasionally go out to eat. Silly…

Monday (110) - I don’t think there is anything planned for today. It is supposed to be pretty nice today with a high of 75°F and nice blue skies. The park filled up with a number of people here for the weekend. A young family from Seattle is next to us with their late-80s VW camper van. They said that it was challenging to find anywhere to go for the holiday weekend.

The automation of the step worked just fine. I still haven’t re-done the refrigerator board with a regular breadboard but I do have the D1 Mini configured for a 3rd temperature sensor for the rear coils and a relay board to turn on the cooling fan. There is a temptation to use PWM for the cooling fan to vary the fan speed depending on the temperature. I also wanted the screw terminals for the board for the temperature sensors and the relay connections. Also the PowerPole connectors for 12VDC power. It’ll make it easier to service the board.

The minor project for today is to just start playing around with the EPS-32S microprocessor. This is sort of the next generation of the EPS-8266 microprocessor used on the D1 Mini. It has a dual-core processor, integrated b/g/n WiFi, LE Bluetooth, more than twice as many ports, etc. But the two features that I’m interested in for my next project is hardware PWM and touchpad input. The one thing I need to be careful of is it runs on 3.3VDC instead of 5VDC. The buck converter has no problem with either. Fortunately, the USB port is still 5VDC.

Later - The weather forecast didn't hold. Rain is now in the forecast and the blue skies have turned into overcast with a high of 70°F. I flashed the ESP-32S and connected a bare wire to GPIO-27 to act as a touchpad. The built-in LED is GPIO-02. I then set up an automation to look for a touch transition and toggle the state of that led. And it worked right out of the box. And, the state of the light including the dimmer setting is retained through a reboot. For a touchpad, I was thinking of simply using the metal bezel of the light but for this test, it was just a bare wire. In order to move on, I need one of the MOSFET modules and they are being shipped to our home. So this project is on temporary hold.

Just because, I added a DHT11 temperature/humidity sensor. BTW, did I mention that all this stuff is incredibly cheap?

It looks life the precision of the DHT11 is only 1.8°F. Not really very useful. The DHT22 is around ten times better.