No sooner has the new weeknotes season started and then there is a week off for the international break, let’s say. It’s entirely down to me (Chris), but I’m sure I read something, somewhere, about everything being the boss’s fault…
Over on the Museum in a Box blog we’ve talked quite a bit about an ongoing project at The British Library that has involved boxes in libraries across the country. Their next exhibition is all about Agatha Christie and new content is currently being deployed. As new boxes are set up we’ve had some setting up of new accounts and helping download audio for new users. I can only apologise to all concerned for scraping the bottom of the murder mystery pun barrel in my customer support emails.
Alongside that, and sending out boxes to far flung exotic locations like Elk Horn IA and Heptonstall YKS, it’s been a good chance to make more tweaks to the firmware. For me that means digging deep into the workings of the http_server component. We use this to run a small server on the box for admin tasks such as writing stickers and downloading new audio.
Adrian has been moving things forward on a few fronts, none of which are especially momentous.** (It’s very important for me to point out that these are Adrian’s words)
He’s updated the release notes for the recent Museum in a Box firmware release, and made an impromptu repair to his laptop when its charging port failed. It’s handy to have parts to hand to be able to immediately get the machine back up and running.
Then there was some certificate wrangling for the cloud platform side of Museum in a Box.
The certificates that encrypt all the traffic to and from the server get regularly updated, as on all websites. Normally that’s a painless experience, but this time our certificate issuer changed their root certificate—which is what all the other certificates are derived from. The new root certificate needs to be in the set that the Box firmware knows about, and it was too new for the Boxes with older firmware versions.
That meant that Boxes which hadn’t upgraded to the new version weren’t able to talk to the cloud platform; which is not ideal, to say the least. Luckily we could switch certificate providers to one whose root certificate is one the Boxes with older firmware are aware of, so they are back working with the online service.
He’s also had one of the air quality sensors that we help develop at Aeternum in his house to run some experiments with indoor air quality.
That had reached the end of the trial, so we were looking to see what can be gleaned from the data. It seems to work quite nicely as a “cooking sensor”:
When there’s just a spike in NO2, that’s generally him making toast (on the gas grill). When there’s a spike in NO2 and bVOC levels, that’s cooking a full meal on the gas hob. And when the bVOCs are ratcheting up on their own, that’s usually the bread machine running.
