Paying off technical debt..

I had plans for today’s Hardware Meetup. I wanted to show off my ESP uploader. However, fate had other ideas. I’ve spent the day paying off technical debt.

You run up technical debt when you think “I’ll fix/document/investigate that later”. I keep a list of my “debts” and try to remember to go back and clear it every now and then. This morning I thought I’d spend ten minutes sorting out a few things. Five hours later I was still at it. Along the way I discovered:

• the ESP32 random number generator uses WiFi noise as a random seed.

• you need to download several files into an ESP32 device when you initialise it. These must include the partition table.

• you can find out the precise commands that are used to deploy a program in PlatformIO by enabling verbose mode for the build process. I’ve done this twice and forgotten how to do it after each time. I really should write that down (which of course is another piece of compound technical debt)

Not withstanding my lack of demo, we did have a very good meetup though.