Liera's journal

Brainstorming (written 13 May 2024)

The brainstorming sessions last week where quite fruitful. We've managed to come up with new ideas for the project's look and where able to come up with new way of showing cups and inspiring people.

That same week (of the 6th) we've also been able to get some ideas past our contact of the Green Office. Of which seems to be happy with anything we do up until now. The feedback received was to focus mostly on the inspiring part of the piece and not so much on securing the cups. Which seems to track with what we know.

Last weekend, although not checked-in, I've worked on creating a cardboard prototype of the project. Which is quite a simple box design. Most likely this will be added to #group later today.

Next to this, last week was mostly in focus of getting inspiration for the project and creating yet again more user stories to be making. The group has been steadily running out of fully defined ones.

Meetings (written 13 May 2024)

I'm keeping some meeting notes. Mostly the standup's currently thought this will be added upon later.

Helping people & writing about it (written 16 May 2024)

Relates to issue #83

I love helping teammates with issues they run against but sometimes that summarises to be quite some of my day. Since this hurts the schools performance reviews I want to find out how I can keep doing this while also keeping myself from hurting the grades.
For example; I've been helping Tim a bit with the graph (#72). But also helped with setting up the database and with people there git problems here and there.

So how can I do this? It got recommended to me to write learning stories about some of it since if it takes quite some time. Somewhere Mats does also recommend trying to find a balance with it. A balance where I can do the stuff I need to do while also keeping it possible for me to help.

For that helping there are the following recommendations;

• Try out multiple ways of helping. Sometimes it's good for people to struggle a with it too.
• Give some time slots for me to help people. With this making sure there is a time limit for helping and that this may happen at a specific time I could give.
• This time slot may be on a specific time of the day like at the end of it.
• But most of all; try out what makes me balance it all.
  • With research possibly learning stories.
  • And with general coding and other stuff the time slot.

Making sure the performance metrics are met here is the most important part. Especially when it comes to the expert reviews!
For this it's probably important for me to set time limits for helping and possibly specific time frames. However lovely I think helping people with stuff is.

Embeded thingy (#83)

Trying to connect own ISP-WROOM-32 but compiling doesn't work. Selected the DOIT ESP32 DEVKIT V1 after which the wifi library compiles. However ArduinoJson is not found. Seems like the documentation fegot to add that they need it installed, so installed it myself and written it down at requirements.

After complilation there are some issues running the code on my ESP32 though. It keeps spamming "Brownout detector was triggered". Searching for that it seems like some of these boards have the wrong capasators. This seems to be fixable with an electrolytic 10uF capacitor between ground (pin 1) and 3.3v (pin 2).
This can also be fixed by disabling the check for it it seems. Though the first option of adding capacitors is probably better.

Does this work for me though? Doesn't seem that way with 10uF. Trying 100uF reveals this does work but here I also accidentally bumped the cable making the board work for a quick second.
Apparently it works when the cable is pushed up, because of that I can conclude the cable is bad. Not the board. This is conformed by another cable I could test with form the HvA's lending desk. After which there wasn't any problem with uploading and running the code.

To conclude this all was was caused by a bad cable connection.

Detect & speerate between ESP32 and WEMOS D1 R2 mini (Learning story #118)

Compiling doesn't work using with all libraries currently since some are not available on the device in use. Since we're using multiple deices for this project during development it's probably important to go ahead and make sure it all works. This project we've been using the following boards;

• The ESP32
  • Where I specifically use the ESP-WROOM-32 which uses the DOIT ESP32 DEVKIT V1 board for compilation.
• And the WEMOS D1 R2 mini which uses the LOLIN(WEMOS) D1 R2 & mini board for compilation.

Archetypes can be detected on most computers, so I thought why not here too? After some digging that's possible. What appears is that some compiler variables are set (aka defined) when compiling with some boards. These definitions define where and what this compiles too.

With some more digging the ESP32 boards define ARDUINO_ARCH_ESP32 for this, while the WEMOS D1 R2 mini defines ARDUINO_ARCH_ESP8266. This information gives the power to check what code to run when compiled during compile time. How you ask? Well just like the following snippet which check for the ESP32;

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#if defined (ARDUINO_ARCH_ESP32)
  // Things only to do if this code is compiled for a ESP32
  // ...
#endif

Unrelated to anything

Little messing with sql;

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SELECT (
    SELECT COUNT(*) FROM `Interaction` WHERE `Status` = True
) - (
    SELECT COUNT(*) FROM `Interaction` WHERE `Status` = False
) AS `current_cup_usage`;

SELECT COUNT(*) AS `total_cups` FROM `Interaction` WHERE `Status` = True;

SELECT `Status`, COUNT(*) AS `total` FROM `Interaction` GROUP BY `Status`;

Improving the user feedback on failed fetch (#122)

When a fetch happens on a page there currently is nothing to show something failed. With my experience I can say that that is horrible to encounter as a user. To improve upon this I have added feedback with the message from the server. Without this one would see the left picture, with this feedback one would see the right one.

For learning, I want the tablet to connect to the website (#123)

For the user story I'm working on #109 it's needed to also display this page on a tablet. This shouldn't be a problem except it apparently is. Why though?

Seems like the tablet is to old to work with the fetch API. Connecting with the local tunnel was also not possible because of that. With it's Android 3.1 it doesn't support the fetch API yet. Seems like this API was only added around 2015! So updating the thing it is...

If only it was that easy. The tablet is so old and out of date that it can't connect with the google servers anymore, meaning it can't update anything. Searching for other tablets was successful though, one with android 5.0.2 and the SamsungBrowser 3.3.
This interestingly was also not modern enough. Is it possible to update the tablet here? No, doesn't seem so. One can connect with the Google login services but not the Play Store. The Samsung Appstore also doesn't allow for updating here. It was possible to fetch some things via jQuery ajax and do things withing CSS but the fetch API was not there yet. Affected pages won't be downgraded to that however.

Let's hope the another tablet at home with android 8 does work here! That thing can still receive updates too, so that should be possible.