Elephant In The Room
You may have seen this story last week. Well that was about me and 999 other people and come April 5th I will officially be one of Thatcher’s Threee Million.
I’m 55 and I can’t face the bullshit of interviews so it’s probably game over. I’m good at what I did (Engineering Manager) but I have zero enthusiasm to explain that several times over and get quizzed on my mental recall of random trivia of HTTP verbs for things that in real life are abstracted away or found with a quick DDG.
Major Success!
What you see there is the first time I have successfully connected a web browser running on Android to a Speeduino ECU via a direct USB connection.
The read rate is poor as it was a very old Motorola that is normally my Squeezebox controller , but it was to hand and had a USB-C socket on it. I have got over 60Hz on a desktop browser.
VETuner Progress
I’m having so much fun with this! The main thing of note is that I’ve ditched echarts for custom implementations of guages, line charts, heatmaps, and 3D surfaces. This has cut about 70% of the bundle size.
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dgs dgs 2889 Feb 1 08:24 favicon.cddaee99.svg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dgs dgs 27699 Feb 1 08:24 index.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dgs dgs 409 Feb 1 08:24 manifest.webmanifest
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dgs dgs 32941 Feb 1 08:24 public.53624c73.css
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dgs dgs 622571 Feb 1 08:24 public.563c0857.js
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dgs dgs 1494 Feb 1 08:24 sw.js
Next up, the layout now actually works at small screen sizes. The gauges can be re-ordered by dragging them around.
Old Dog, New Tricks
I was given some Squeezebox hardware by someone at work. It works really well, aprat from the Duet remotes . They’re hard to see, and lose connection to the network too easily.
I was despondent about this, as the Squeezebox kit and software is really good, but not being able to reliably control it was a PITA. I could use the web interface, but my work laptop can’t connect to my LAN for reasons.
Sloperator
I am a sloperator. I use LLMs where I think appropriate. The trigger for this post is that I’d always been mildly irked that whilst the pages of the blog had tags, they weren’t clickable and were thus a little useless. So I fired up Gemini in the editor and gave it this instruction
Each page has categories tags. I want these to be clickable in the browser that leads to a page listing all the posts with that tag
And off it chuntered
Diff
My Stupid Car has just got a new limited slip diff, but this isn’t about that.
One of the benefits with developing VETuner, is that I can fix all the things that irritate me in TunerStudio . Top of the list is the difference dialog. If you load a new tune file that doesn’t agree with what the ECU has then you are presented with a multi-page dialog that looks something like this
Oh Clock!
I want to connect the code running in the browser, to the ECU. The browser code sends requests that the ECU processes in a synchronous manner and sends back the data.
sequenceDiagram
participant Browser
participant ECU
Browser->>+ECU: Request
ECU->>-Browser: Response
If I use Chrome on a desktop, I can use the WebSerial API and do effectively that. Running at 115200 baud I can get about a 60Hz rate poll rate, which is pretty decent.
VETuner
Introducing VETuner
Ever since I put a Megasquirt MS1 into the Stupid Car, back in 2009, I’ve been fiddling with software to work with it and similar ECUs. It started with MSLogger, and Android app that only logged and didn’t provide any capability to adjust the ECU. Then I joined the effort working on MSDroid which was much more capable.
Fast forward many years and MSDroid is effectively dead. I still fiddle with the code, but I can’t publish any updates to Google Play as it is tied into an obsolete payments library and that side of it belongs to the project owner.
Confident Idiot
I thought I’d have a play with Copilot to see what it could do as I maintain this blog using VSCode as it is significantly better than both emacs & vi1. I thought a nice simple task would be to add OpenGraph tags the the head of each most. It was more painful than I thought.
TL;DR It finally got it right, but it didn’t notice it wasn’t reading the output of it’s own test tools and it happily made assumptions without testing them. I probably could have done it myself in a similar time if I hadn’t got up at 4:30am today to give my daughter and her boyfriend a lift to Luton Airport2
Bush
The Stupid Car failed it’s MOT on knackered bushes in the shocks and the Panhard rod. I knew this day was coming as they looked pretty ropy last year when I took this photo
This is not something I’d ever done before, so new stuff to learn and maybe an excuse for new tools! First port of call was the Spax website to see if they had suitable bushes. TL;DR was “We don’t support old shocks, want to buy some new ones?” That would be the Answer Of Last Resort. So off I went and did a lot of searching.