This research deep dive was inspired from using my Dust Collector Remote. It works great, but after a year using it I’ve found the delay to connect pretty annoying. On bad days with a router misbehaving the 4 or 5 second delay while I’m waiting to turn a tool on can get frustrating. This started getting me thinking about how it could be handled faster. I’ve used ESP-Now a handful of times and have appreciated it’s quick boot to ‘do something useful’ time.

Once you get to use a dust collector remote in someone else’s shop, your dust collector will not be the same. For me it was in a well maintained woodworking shop in a co-working space in Oakland, every time I was back in my shop at the museum I was irritated to not have it, frequently just leaving the dust collector whirring away contributing to my tinnitus and wasting power. Now that I have a decent workshop setup in my home it was something that had to be addressed, not just for the table saw and other tools but I wanted it to be able to be controlled by the CNC.

As I’m deploying more LoRa nodes I find myself needing a more capable debugging system. While at home I simply use an SDR connected to my desktop to ensure devices are transmitting as expected. In the field that is a loftier goal. I’ve tried using an SDR connected to an Android phone with limited success, this seems to just kill the battery more than anything. Additionally one of the goals I had was a battery backed computer that could be semi-permanently mounted in my truck.

Going to have a small batch of unpopulated PCBs available in the new OiT Electronics shop. Selling these will help with a final revision of this PCB that will correct some of the mistakes that made manufacturing and bring-up too difficult to make continuing worth while. Get one now!

I found myself in a conversation about ESP32 boot times. Specifically the time it takes from boot until user code can do something useful with an IO. As this was something relevant to Richmote but I didn’t have any actual data I decided to do a simple setup to measure the results. My test setup consisted of two probes one connected to the RST line and the other to a random GPIO.