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A project log for Wafer Frame

An edge-lit frame with silicon wafers on display, using NTP time to control brightness

sukasaSukasa 01/10/2017 at 22:480 Comments

Came back and revisited this project more, recently. I wasn't happy with some of the code quality and as it was my first ESP / NodeMCU Lua project some of the programming strategies were... questionable, at best. So, having learned a few things from other code I'd written for this device I chose to redo the code, utilizing the proper event systems present in the firmware and also to redesign the code to use Overlays, so that I wouldn't need to worry about one mode's memory use clobbering another's.

I also took the opportunity to remove NTP time support from the program. While a nice feature and one I did appreciate, I see no reason why I couldn't just set that up running on Home Assistant or some other automation software, and make it a smarter system than a fixed uneditable value anyways. And the extra RAM it would free up (even if it wasn't much) wouldn't hurt either. The new code is now far, far simpler and didn't need to be "minified" or even compiled, for everything to fit nicely and run without a problem. And I've nearly doubled the number of modes that the frame can run, to boot!

Overall I'm quite happy with the quality of the new code and its capabilities, and while I have one or two additions in mind (telnet support being one of them), the new code is definitely working out great.

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