AI coding agents get much more interesting when they can touch real hardware. I used Codex to compile, upload, monitor serial consoles, analyze failures, and iterate on two ESP32-based T-Beam boards until a BLE file-transfer bug in fresh C++ #Reticulum interface was fixed.
Hardware-in-the-loop debugging feels like a real shift and shifts the development cycle into 6th gear.
https://salemdata.net/johnpress/?p=710
#AI #EmbeddedSystems #ESP32 #Bluetooth #IoT #HardwareHacking
I stress tested the unit for distance and found they remained paired between basement and 2nd floor of a house. Once the unit in the basement went outside the connection broke.
Had the units sending simultaneous and continuous text of: If by Rudyard Kipling.
Now have to consider the logic for resiliency, queuing, heartbeats, and other complicated stuff to make Bluetooth pairing for real world scenarios. I was impressed with T-Beams Bluetooth distance.
Epiphany: I entered the #TBeamSupreme arena to field-test #LoRa and #Reticulum mesh behavior. That led to building a Bluetooth interface.
The surprise: Bluetooth may let me shrink the test range. Instead of sending people blocks away to force LoRa gaps, I can use walls, houses, and barriers on my own property to create repeatable mesh-resiliency tests.
The voyage of discovery expands: I've compiled the microReticulum + BLE interface for my Intel workstation (binary is 8.8M -- ouch!) and have succeeded in having my Intel workstation sends poetry to a T-Beam over Bluetooth and vice-versa. Using a KIVO low quality bluetooth on the Intel. I'm having each unit have its own poem so it's clear where the source is coming from. Next: compile for ARM64 (Rpi4 & then RpiZero2w) and AMD64 (System76 Pangolin)
I've successfully compiled and run builds on:
Intel (Gentoo, hardware: 2012) workstation
AMD laptop (Gentoo: System 76 Pangolin)
Raspberry Pi 4B (Raspbian Trixie: built & run)
Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (just run using image built on 4B)
Each of the above successfully paired with the T-Beam DAN and using Reticulum exchanged poetry. What could be nicer?
The problem I feared was the variance in Bluetooth chips and interaction with the OS.
John Poole
adingbatponder 
👾