E-switch UI Development / FSM

TK might have used the internal pullup resistor.

+1
Tom, if you and TK decide on the next MCU and adapt the firmware, I believe the rest of us will follow and jump on board very quickly. I say just go for it! (On your spare time that is) :wink:

Finally! :partying_face: You had a long wait.

Awesome! I just reflashed three Q8s to play with this evening.

How about a third setting to select indicator high/low/off when the main emitters are on?

What HOLD_TIMEOUT value are you using on your Q8? I’m still using 15 without issue.

Is the low brightness barely visible or it depends on led forward voltage ? Or with a higher resistor on switch board I can lower the brightness more?

No, I set the pin as input for “low” mode. Same trick I used in Ferrero Rocher.

I haven’t really looked into external sensor support, but I’ve tried to structure code in a way which would make it easy to change between internal and external. Pin shortages haven’t been an issue yet but they probably will be in the near future. ROM space hasn’t been an issue yet either, but again, it probably will be.

If I recall correctly, we’re mostly waiting on toolchain support before going to newer MCUs.

I haven’t changed the default HOLD_TIMEOUT. I think the current value is probably pretty close to Goldilocks for the population average, but I’m kinda guessing.

Instead of high/low/off while the main emitters are on, how about a slightly different approach? Set indicator brightness based on main emitter brightness — “low” for moon to 7135, “high” for 7135 to turbo, “off” while main emitter is off? I just tried this on mine, and it seems to work reasonably well. It automatically stays in sync with the main emitters, it eliminates the need for a mid-ramp blink, and it can still be set independently for the two “off” modes (off and lockout).

No, it’s still fairly bright. It’s about 1/3rd as much power.

Hmm I want high as bright as original with narsil and a very low that I don’t see in daylight just in complete darkness. But still great option. Maybe If I change the switch board led resistor to set low mode low enough for me the high will be bright enough for daylight.

Anyone know what is the cause of this error?

avrdude verification error first mismatch at byte 0×0000
0×00 != 0xa0 content mismatch

I successfully flashing the MCU with Narsil. I then tested the driver and it worked. I changed one line of code built a new hex file and tried to reflash the driver but received the error above. I then tried ti flash the first hex file but received the same error.

I’m about to flash a new MCU, but before I do I am hoping for some feedback as I ended up rendering the last MCU unresponsive after several reflashing attempts.

I know this isn’t the best spot for this but I don’t get much response from the Narsil page. I don’t think a lot of able people follow that thread other than tom and he is a busy man. I always feel bad trying to get his attention. Anyway… TMI :slight_smile:

Clever!

Can we still have an ‘always off when main emitters are on’ option?

It usually means a physical issue with the SOIC8 clip connection or how it’s wired. You can probably just carefully re-clip it and try again.

Perhaps.

For now, it just syncs the indicator to the main emitters. An option to control what it does during use would be a good idea though, since “stay off” seems to be a pretty common thing people want. Not sure where to put it though, unless I add another explicit config mode somewhere.

I haven’t done it yet, but it looks like the Q8 needs a different ramp than the D4. I was hoping they’d be close enough to use the same values, but the ramp on my Q8 looks pretty not-linear with FSM. The mid-ramp elbow is pretty noticeable. I did at least make it use a different voltage adjustment factor for Q8 though, so battcheck should be closer to accurate.

I also need to fix thermal regulation again, since the last time I tried it on a D4 I got weird results. It’s probably okay on a Q8 due to its extra mass, but that needs testing too.

There’s also the blinking indicator thing to add, and maybe an alarm clock function, which both need a half-sleep mode. And perhaps a goodnight config mode. Maybe change “goodnight” to “sunset”, and “alarm clock” to “sunrise”. And perhaps a super-simple muggle mode (and muggle config mode to set safe limits).

With all that, I might actually run out of space. It still has about 1000 bytes left, but space is definitely starting to become a concern. Maybe I can refactor the existing config modes into a single common function — same UI but smaller code.

Kinda just thinking out loud here.

Oh, and one of Dale’s Q8s was acting up; sounds like an extra-noisy switch or something. That could probably use some attention. I have some theories, but can’t test them with my hardware because it’s not misbehaving that way.

And I was doing some “bump testing” to see how the Q8 reacts to being hit during use, and a couple times I managed to get it into a state where it wouldn’t respond… and afterward once it acted like eeprom had gotten slightly corrupted (it had an invalid ramp floor setting, which made a couple things act weird). Not sure what I can do about that.

More improvements?! You really do spoil us, TK.

I update Andúril on my Q8s whenever you announce a revision since they’re so easy to open and reflash.

Will there be a compile-time option to configure thermal regulation for different lights? I’m running Andúril on my D1, D4, and X6R, too.

Did this require reflashing to fix?

I don’t purposely bump my lights looking for an issue, but even with occasional drops I’ve not encountered a power-interrupt with any lights.

I’ve yet to drop a Q8 though. :smiley:

I haven’t really found that different thermal regulation parameters are needed for different lights. In general, if it works on a D4-219c, it pretty much works on everything else too — especially bigger lights which hardly even need regulation. Or at least that’s what I’ve found so far. But getting it to behave well on a D4 has been tricky.

The weird bump-test result didn’t require reflashing, but I did have to set the ramp floor again in config mode. It could also be avoided by verifying the values at boot, but that takes extra bytes I prefer not to spend if possible. Instead, it just verifies a single header value and assumes all the following values are okay.

I’ll have to see if I can make it happen again, because it occurs to me that I didn’t try doing a full power cycle first. It may have simply loaded a bad value, rather than actually having bad data in eeprom.

I had problems with my laptop compiling anything and I have to ask somebody a favor! I want to build an L6 with Texas avenger 30mm LDO 3 channel driver and with XHP70.2 led with 2S battery setup. I like to use indicator led in the side switch. For the indicator I sacrifice the middle output channel so remove the Nx7135-s from the battery side and use their MCU output pin as the indicator led. Can someone make a hex file for me for this setup from the newest Andúril firmware? I will be greatly appreciated!
Thank You!

TK:
An Idea for SMOOTH and DISCRETE
To switch between SMOOTH and DISCRETE you use 3 clicks.
I don’t know if you indicate the state to the user.

To show the user what he is using the main LED does this:
SMOOTH:
It dims from low to a brighter level and back down to low. Within one second or quicker. Like a single dragon breath from Manker Lamps.
DISCRETE:
It goes through three brightness​ steps within a second. Sth. like Low Mid High

wuuHOOuuu vs. TickTickTick

When you add a mogle mode you can use another 3 clicks and blink out eg. low high low high or another sequence.
So you can cycle through SMOOTH, DISCRETE and MOGLE MODE.

It blinks off and back on quickly to indicate that something happened… and if it’s going from smooth to discrete it’ll also jump to the nearest stair step. But otherwise it doesn’t attempt to indicate what happened.

Adding a detailed indication would require creating an asynchronous feedback system of some sort. It’s not terribly difficult, but it does expose the code to an entire new class of bugs. For example, Narsil does async feedback to indicate which power channel is being used, and if the user clicks during the feedback it can have side effects like turning the indicator LED off. It happens because there are multiple different logic threads fighting simultaneously for control over a shared resource.

Originally this was considered a bug because it wasn’t implemented on purpose, but Tom left it that way because he liked it. Not all interactions of this type are going to be beneficial though… and I’ve tried to avoid making it even possible. However, I think it should be reasonably safe, due to the way events and tasks are scheduled in FSM instead of running immediately. I haven’t tested, but I think the worst effects would be to delay things like state changes until the feedback animation has completed. Or possibly to interrupt the animation, depending on how it’s implemented.

I don’t think it’d be a good idea to include muggle mode in the cycle. Muggle mode is intended as a one-way trip, a state you can put a light in before handing it to someone who doesn’t know much about it, and they hopefully won’t be able to exit muggle mode by accident.

So the safest way to end mogle mode would be disconnect from power?

I think a battery disconnect can happen in a muggle hand. But a click, click, click, hold or some combination not happen offten.

In a few years we need lamps with a projector LED so we can project a UI diagramm on the ground.
:slight_smile:

I was thinking power cycle to exit muggle mode, because it’s consistent with how one must exit momentary mode, and it also works for lockout mode.

With a D4 flashed in the right way, it’s actually harder to power cycle than it might seem at first. I got standby power down to 0.35 uA (0.00035 mA), so I can take off the tailcap, walk away to have a conversation, come back, put the tailcap back on, and the light doesn’t know it was disconnected from power while it was asleep. So in practice a power cycle means “loosen tailcap, click button, tighten tailcap” or “loosen tailcap while light is coming out the front”.