How stupid can a single person be? I’ll tell you how stupid…
I got up at 5:30, and while I don’t have angle to mount it, I at least wanted to flash Tasmota to the Sonoff SV that I intend to use to make an electromagnetic lock for the garage. Okey-doke…need to solder on pins. No problem!
Wrong. I’ve soldered a lot of pins since I learned how from the nice Indian lady on YouTube, and I had pins on the SV pretty quickly. Went to plug it into the serial converter, and…the pins are too short. WTF? Did I get them too hot and melt the plastic so they slipped? No, they’re all nice and even. What the hell did I do? I soldered them on backwards! No, not just facing the wrong way; instead of putting the short side through the board, I put the long side through. How I managed to do that, I don’t know, but I have a heated solder-sucker, so I figure I’ll just de-solder and do them right.
Wrong. I went into the Man Cave, and looked in the plastic bin with the white lid. Extra tips, extra solder, extra flux, some cases, and a couple of soldering irons…and no solder-sucker. Okay, maybe I just forgot to put it away, and it’s by my desk. Nope. Not there. Okay, I was soldering at the table, so maybe I used it there? Didn’t think so, but worth a check. Nope. Jesus H Christ on a crutch…where is the goddamned thing! Well, never mind for now; I have two of the SVs, so I’ll just use the second one. Got the pins soldered on it, connected it, fired up Tasmotizer, and we’re all set! Right? Right?
Wrong. Connection timed out. I had problems with Arduino the last time I tried to flash, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise, but I spent the next three hours, trying to troubleshoot this connection. The serial converter is correctly detected, and so is the port. I am in the dialout group, and I’ve held the power button while connecting the SV, so it’s in flash mode. In the end, I removed brltty (it’s a TTY thing for Braille, and I’d read that sometimes it will take over the USB port, so it needed to die), and I ran check after check, doing things I only half understood, trying to figure out why it showed as connected, but clearly was not. I even rebooted a few times, though that’s more of a Win thing than a Linux thing. Nothin’. Fuck.
Eventually, I decided maybe it was Tasmotizer itself? Probably not, but there’s a web interface, so it was worth a shot. Everything appeared right in the browser, so I hit the button to flash. The device isn’t ready. What? Whaddya mean it isn’t ready? I’ve been at this for four fucking hours; it damned well should be ready! I thought maybe it was because Tasmotizer still had hold of it somehow, or at least the port, so I disconnected it, held the button, and reconnected. The flashing green light didn’t come on this time? Huh? Tried again. Still no flashing green light. What’s going on? Did I fry it somehow?
I gave up on it and went looking for my solder-sucker again so I could use the first SV after putting on new pins. WHERE THE HELL COULD I HAVE PUT THE SOLDER-SUCKER??? Back and forth I went, Man Cave to table, to office, back to Man Cave…it’s nowhere to be found. Then, I happened to be walking up the hallway, and looked at the chair beside the table. Miffy’s toybox is there so Beatrice doesn’t push it around when she vacuums, and underneath it is…the other plastic bin with the white lid. You know…the one where I store my soldering station, my flux, and the stuff I regularly use, including the solder-sucker. Jesus…fucking…Christ. I forgot I had two of them. There’s the solder-sucker, big as life, right where it’s supposed to be. For fuck’s sake.
While I was waiting for the solder-sucker to heat, just for the hell of it, even though the green light wasn’t flashing, I tried Tasmota one more time, and…it flashed right away. I hadn’t fried it or damaged it at all. What I had done was forget how to flash a Sonoff device, or more specifically, what the lights mean. The flashing green light does not, in fact, mean, “Hey, gimme some code over here!”; it means, “Can a guy get some wifi?” When the LED is off, and not flashing, the device is in flash mode. Le…sigh.
Since the solder-sucker was hot anyway, I de-soldered the pins I’d fucked up and put on new ones. IDK what I’m going to do with the second SV, so I guess I’ll just stick Tasmota on it and store it until I find a use. At least this time I’ll remember what the goddamned lights mean.
How stupid can one person be? Oh yeah…that stupid.
