Progress

Well, it has been a productive week. Much progress has been made since getting to the root problem with FreeRTOS and WiFi on the Raspberry Pi Pico.

Like the phoenix rising from the ashes, I’ve been pulling in the code from my previous attempts and have the been piecing them together. Progress has been very quick. Too bad I did not dig into the library earlier, but honestly, I may not have hit on the root cause without some considerable investigating. Thankfully GitHub user, GUVWAF, had submitted a fix for the root cause around the same time I had submitted the pull request, so it was not necessary for me to dig into the libraries much more. I’m very thankful to Earle and Maximilian reviewing my pull request and promptly replying to my comments. Even though my pull request was not needed, I learned a great deal from the effort with Earle and Maximilian’s support.

I’m hopeful that I will be pushing some code to my SpeechTimer GitHub repository some time this week. I may not have all the features hammered out, but hope to be close. I will be working on some of the more difficult aspects, which include using the remote and providing a web interface for controlling the timer. The reason these are the more difficult aspects, is not so much in writing the code, but figuring out the best way to control the timer using the remote.

Update 11 December 2023

The project files are now live on GitHub at https://github.com/richteel/SpeechTimer. There are two things missing so far, but it a minimal usable project. The timer is controllable through the IR Remote. It has three predefined timers for typical Toastmasters meeting activities.

• 5 to 7 Minutes for Speeches
• 1 to 2 Minutes for Table Topics
• 2 to 3 Minutes for Evaluations

There is a fourth timer that may be set using the numbers on the remote and the left and right buttons to change from minimum (left) to maximum (right) times.

The two missing features are the web user interface and the remote unit. I plan to work on the web interface first, but may work on the remote unit. I’m thinking about two different architectures for the web interface and need to decide which one I want to use. One is easy to implement, but it is only available on the same subnet as the timer. The other could control the clock from anywhere, but is a bit more difficult to implement.