Category: Technology

firebeetle esp8266

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DFrobot FireBeetle

I’ve gone into an idle state this February, and it’s given me time to organize all that I’ve experienced and learned using various embedded processor boards (i.e. internet-of-things). One of the little boards that was sent my way is DFrobot’s FireBeetle ESP8266 ( https://www.dfrobot.com/product-16Norm34.html ). I’d never heard of DFrobot before the FireBeetle showed up. My on-line providers of IoT boards are Adafruit, Sparkfun, Arduino and Seeed Studio (  https://www.seeedstudio.com ), just to name those four. DFrobot wants to present a web interface similar to what those on-line stores do, with their on twist. Anyway…

I use several languages to program those boards; Micro Python, Circuit Python, and C/C++ via SDKs and the Arduino IDE. I chose the Arduino route because of the low resources (memory, clock speed) of the supporting Tensilica processor in the ESP-12F. I tried to add the DFrobot ESP8266 repo link to the Arduino IDE’s, and in the beginning it worked. But during my development work with that repo, the Arduino IDE begin to emit messages about not finding the correct version of mkspiffs for the FireBeetle. Whether it was building a FireBeetle sketch or any other action, such as updating the boards or libraries, I’d get that message many, many time. I got tired of it real fast. In the end I substituted the FireBeetle’s initial repo for the one supplied by Arduino ( http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json ). I have come to trust Arduino’s hardware and software, along with Adafruit, Sparkfun and Seeed.

Along the way I’ve also discovered some extra resources that have helped me to understand how the EPS8266 is designed, especially the processor at the heart of the ESP8266, the Tensilica L106.

There’s a lot more to be found at the Espressif website, https://www.espressif.com . I’ve been digging into other Espressif ESP designs, which I hope to write about in the future. It’s all very interesting, and I feel like a kid let loose in a toy store.

i don’t like the washington post’s new news app on ios

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Old version of app

I’m very picky about my news sources and the tools I use to consume that news. Those tools are apps on iOS. My two primary news sources are The Washington Post and The Guardian. I pay for both in order to get full access and to avoid any advertising. The both work for me.

But now The Washington Post wants to replace the app I currently use on my iPhone with a newer and more improved version.

New! and Improved! version of app

The critical difference for me is how the stories are presented. In the older version each story was in a panel, and the panels were stacked vertically. The stories are organized into sections, and the sections are selectable via the menu at the bottom. Simply scrolling up or down allows you to quickly browse the stories. A single tap opens up the story. If you swipe left you move to the next full story. Swipe right an you go back to the prior story. I personally like to hit the browse button and then swipe down (or up) the panels, jumping around a bit and reading the stories in each section that caught my interest. I found it clean, well organized, and easy to navigate.

The newer app is flat. There are no panels. The stories in each section are packed together with little differentiation. It unfortunately looks too much like a social media feed, such as Facebook. And that’s probably what annoys me the most. I’m sure somebody in management and marketing thought that borrowing the look of a social media feed was a Good Thing. It’s not. Another annoyance is having the sections listed across the top as a sliding menu, in small text. You can swipe that menu left or right and pick a section at random. I suppose that’s supposed to aid “discoverability.” I’ll give a half-point to the ability to swipe down in the main news sections. Swipe left in a section and it slides to the next section. Swipe right and it slides back to the prior section. It’s a nice touch, but not nice enough to counter what I consider its flaws. Those flaws being a jumbled mess more complicated to navigate and find anything.

There’s not much I can do about the change. The Washington Post is switching to the new app, and the old app is going away. I knew this before writing this post. But I don’t have to go quietly into The Washington Post’s idea of a better app. The new hotness isn’t better, it’s worse.