GreatBlueHeron

I have a project idea and a bit of reading suggests to me that ESP32 might be the best solution. I have never touched ESP32 or anything similar. I have basic electronics understanding and capability - I built a kit Class D stereo amplifier years ago, do my only electrical work on my motorcycles etc. I'm a retired Unix admin. so am confident I can manage the software and programming aspects.

I have strange voltage issues in my home and want to record voltage over time to see if I can correlate anything that might suggest a cause. I need to be able to measure 0 to about 150VAC. Happy to go into the details of my issues if anyone is curious.

My plan is to go to AliExpress and get a 5 pack of "ESP32 Development Board WiFi+Bluetooth" and a 5 pack of "ZMPT101B AC output voltage sensor".

I'm already running Home Assistant and mqtt so am hoping I can use that as my recording and reporting engine.

My questions:

• is there anything else I'm likely to need?
• is there any way to find a good, or avoid a bad, vendor on AliExpress for those components? I don't trust the reviews.
• there are lots of "getting started" tutorials - any recommendations for a good one appropriate for background?

... or are notifications just really bad on Android?

For background, we've got an old, sick, dog and my wife often needs to get help from me urgently. I'm still running an old Pixel 4a - it worked really well for me until Google crippled the battery and even now it works well enough that I'm not tempted to upgrade.

My notifications always seem to be delayed - in batches. I have 3 buildings on my property and each has a Nest doorbell. Some days I can be walking around and I'll constantly hear ding, ding, ding as I walk past each doorbell. Other days I can walk around and hear nothing, and then I'll get 5-10 notifications all at once.

Today was a perfect example of why this is so frustrating - I'm sitting at my desk with my phone in front of me. It's plugged in an charging. My phone starts ringing and it's my wife upset that I have not responded to her messages. I go help her with the dog and come back to my phone and sure enough, 8 minutes ago there's a notification from Google Chat, 6 minutes ago there's a notification from Google Messages and 4 minutes ago there's the phone call. The Google Chat and Google Messages notifications never came through - until the phone call came in!

I've been through and made sure that all the battery optimisations are turned off for all the apps that I want instant notifications from - but that shouldn't have any impact here - my phone was plugged in.

Is this normal Android? (kinda rhetorical question - I've been running Android since my Nexus 4 and don't think this is normal but it feels like it's somehow the "new" normal)

I'm not running the stock Pixel launcher - does the launcher get involved in notification delivery at all?

I've just had a 2nd USB3 SATA enclosure go bad. I can't remember what the first one was. This one is an Orico MS400U3. It was plugged into a Linux box with one drive and the drive started reporting strange errors so I removed the drive and connected it direct to SATA and it's working fine - after fsck fixed the errors on it. I thought maybe the USB port on the Linux box might be bad so I plugged the Orico into a Windows PC with a known good 1TB drive in it (a different drive than originally gave errors) - Windows sees the drive as 115PB and won't let me format it.

Is there any explanation for this other than the controller board in the enclosure somehow failing?

I'm thinking of going for this StarTech one next. Any other suggestions?

I'm really disappointed with myself. I thought I would enjoy, and be good at, sharpening knives. I don't and I'm not! I have two Shapton water stones and I can get a nice edge on my chisels with a jig that maintains the angle for me, but I just can't get a good edge on a knife. I don't know if I'm not patient enough, if I just can't hold the angle well enough or what, but I give up.

My wife is, understandably, frustrated with a kitchen full of dull knives and bought one of those drag through carbide/ceramic sharpeners and I can't even make that work - I drag a blade through a few times, there is a pile of swarf in the sharpener, the blade looks sharp - but it's dull as dull, maybe even worse than before "sharpening".

We have a range of knives from grocery store mild steel, through decent consumer Mundial and Victorinox to one low end nice Global.

Appreciate any suggestions!

Some of you may recall my previous post about a ~20V potential between my electrical ground and my concrete slab. That's still not resolved - it's currently sitting just under 10V.

Today I have a new mystery - to me anyway..

I'm sitting at my desk and notice that I got a tingle from the outer shield/shell of a USB-C cable. I got my multi-meter and measured 65V from the cable to me with my bare feet on the slab! It drops to about 16V if I lift my feet off the floor. I immediately assumed the charging brick it's plugged into was faulty, but just in case I took a more measurements and found that the another similar charger has a similar offset, the "ground" part of a TRS cable plugged into an amplifier is similar, the accessible metal shield part of a USB-A port on an ASUS ChromeBox is similar. I assume that's not normal?

This is a new slab on grade build. Ground and neutral are properly bonded - I checked a few outlets and ground to neutral is ~0.3V.

Edit - I don't think there is any safety risk - I measured 0.3μA current.

I live in a small community at the end of a long line in Atlantic Canada. We get frequent power disruptions so I have installed a backup generator. I have a bit of a home lab, and don't like my server to lose power with no warning so I've recently installed a small UPS to keep it running in the gap between my power going out and the generator starting. The UPS logs data and lets me access it.

I'm wondering if I should be concerned about my input voltage. The blue line in the minimum for the hour, the amber is maximum for the hour. The zero period on the 8th of March was when I had the power turned off to do some work.

The default configuration for my UPS has it cut over to battery power at 88V, so it seems some significant variation is expected!

I tried searching my power company web site but they don't seem to publish anything about guaranteed, or even expected, supply voltage.

I'm very new to this. I have used Street Complete to do some little things over the last few months, but made my first manual edits yesterday.

I'm starting by fixing up the small community where I live. A lot of stuff has already been done by some automation using "NRCan-CanVec-7.0" data and it's really wrong for civic numbers. But, it matches the numbers in the "standard" layer in the maps. I'm happy to go around and manually draw houses and update civic numbers (I did say it's a small community) but the map is going to look confusing when the base layer shows conflicting numbers. How can I fix that?

I hope avoiding Amazon fits this community rules?

I need a few bits to resurrect an old PC. My Amazon cart is $68 with shipping - we're going to cancel Prime, but my wife is still working on downloading all her photos. Best I can do elsewhere is near double this PLUS shipping from 3 different suppliers and 2 of the suppliers are on eBay, which is also a US company.

I moved to Canada a few years ago from Australia where I had pccasegear, scorptec and others. It seems Canadians have become reliant on the US market and Amazon and we now have no competitive local retailers for this type of thing?

I've just had a new house built in Atlantic Canada. This morning I noticed a bit of a tingle from my coffee machine when I touched it with wet hands. The machine has a grounded (3 pin) plug and I checked - it has 0V between the parts I touched (the entire metal outer case) and the ground socket in the outlet. So, I got curious and did some more measurements. It turns out there is 20V AC (and about 300mV DC) between the ground in my outlets and me when I'm standing on my floor (sealed concrete slab) with bare feet.

I assume this isn't good?

I'll be calling the electrician that wired the house in the morning, but I'd appreciate any insights you might have.

I've just had a new house built in Atlantic Canada. It's not performing as well as I had hoped it would - I'm getting condensation on my windows and door handles and my power bill is higher than I expected.

I know I rushed things a bit with the build, and we were on a tight budget, but I (naively?) thought that following the building code would get me a "good" house.

I've done a little research and found that I have a very generic, builder basic level, air exchanger - a FanTech Flex100. Their own documentation even only lists the efficiency as "moderate". My initial reaction to this discovery is that air exchanger efficiency is critical - it's literally bringing in colder air than it really needs to - and I should look into upgrading as soon as I can afford it.

Does this make sense, or are there other factors I should consider first.

(I know there's lots of detail missing - I didn't want to put in too much effort for a question in what appears to be a dead community. Happy to elaborate as much as needed.)

So pissed off with google. I've had google phones since my Nexus 4. I'm not a power user by any means and I'm now only on my 4th phone since then - a Pixel 4a. It's perfect for me - nice and small so it fits in my pocket, headphone jack etc. and all day battery! For my usage pattern I never had to think about battery even on such an old phone - I'd just charge it on my nightstand each night and never give it a thought.

Since the recent update - it's now 09:26 and I'm already down to 50%.

I know they say it's for my safety, but I simply don't believe them. I can't afford a new phone now, don't live anywhere where I can get the battery replaced reasonably and it's out of stock where I've looked for a DIY replacement. I'm stuck with this.

Update - typing the paragraph above took me down to 48%

I needed to connect two buildings and was having machines in to dig a 4' (1.2m) deep trench between them for a water line so I went to Amazon and bought a 250' (76m) pre-terminated copper Cat6 cable. As I was going to be burying it I wanted to be sure it worked, so I used it as a "fly lead" for my laptop for a week or two first and it worked fine. I know it initially connected at 1Gbps, but (stupidly) I can't be 100% certain it stayed at full speed the whole time.

Now that it's buried I'm only getting 100Mbit/s. It does sometimes connect at 1Gbit/s, but it later falls back to 100Mbit/s. I have an old Cisco SG300-10P on one end and a Ubiquiti Edge Router X on the other. I disabled 802.3 Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) on the Cisco and, as expected, it made no difference. The Cisco has built in cable test capability and it says I have an 84m open cable on all pairs - even when connected to the ER/X and working. Is there some sort of loopback/test termination I can make for the other end to get a better (more meaningful) result? I've tried searching, but failed.

The plug at one end did get pushed through some silicone caulk as it was being shoved through a hole in a wall. I cleaned it off with alcohol and it looks clean, but I'm considering cutting the plug off and replacing it with a socket as my next debugging step as it would be more convenient anyway.

I live about an hour from the nearest large town so there's no way I'm getting someone here with a proper tester at a reasonable price. If I can't figure it out myself I'll revert to the pair of airMax GigaBeam radios that have given me a solid 800Mbit/s for the last 3 years with only visual alignment!

Edit: this is the cable https://a.co/d/i6mYLy1