Firstly, a thank-you to Brian, who commented on my last post. I had a very detailed reply, but commenting on Blogspot seems to be borked for me. I'll try to answer some of your questions at some point in time if I get commenting fixed.
Now, on to the progress... I finally implemented sunrise/sunset time-offsetting for the door. If I enable either sunrise or sunset offsetting, the door-open time becomes a base time, and then the controller checks the day-of-year, and does a table-lookup to obtain the offset in minutes. It adds the offset to the door-open time, and subtracts the offset from the door-close time. Now the Winter Solstice has passed, the days are starting to get longer again, so I got this in place just in time.
I also gutted the code that checks to see if it's time to open or close the door and made it a lot simpler.
Lastly, and this was probably the biggest "bugfix", I added some "keepalive" code to the WiFi connection. Before, if the connection dropped, the BlackWidow board wouldn't do anything to reconnect. I would have to go out and reboot the controller in order to get it talking to the network again. To fix this, I added a method to the WiShield object that returns the WiFi connection status. The webserver checks this periodically and re-inits the WiFi connection if it is down.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
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