Locomotive Elevator

@inq just worked out what you were trying to tell me last night in your message. Anyway I had already worked that part of it out, but the bottom line is I had a bit of a disaster in the train room dropped everything and the 8266 unit lost its way, or so I thought. So I purchased another 8266 unit and started from scratch, then noticed that the last two digits on the address had changed again (Got this from the Arduino code when I loaded it up) It has been 47, 41, and now 34? This threw me because, for one I obviously dont understand web addresses but thought this may of been my problem in the first place when I had the mishap in the train room I couldn't get the web page to reload so that prompted me to get the new unit and start from scratch. Anyway I have the Inqportal all up and running again now with the files loaded, but I am struggling to get the elevator to work I have loaded the numbers as before but it keeps telling me it has hit the limit switch? I could really do with some help, if you can spare me some time.

Cheers Phil

P.S. In case you need to know, I am using version 5.3.2 of the Inq Portal and the software version I am using is version 0.9.9.

Posted by: @thephilnewman

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It has been 47, 41, and now 34?

Routers control addressing, not software on connecting device.  A computer/phone/tablet/ESP8266 has no ability to control that.  Routers typically "reserve" the address (say 192.168.1.47) for a device it has seen before.  It only holds on to this reserve for a finite time (typically 24 hours).  If you exceed that time, you may get a new address.  As your new ESP8266 is a different device, it is given a different address.  As @zander said, it is possible to configure a router to assign a permanent address to your device.  You might want to research how to do that with your router or you will continuously run into this issue.

Posted by: @thephilnewman

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I could really do with some help, if you can spare me some time.

You can provide details of your problem here.  Odds are you will be helped.  As you have insisted on using equipment I have no familiarity, I will let the forum help in guiding you.  If it is a general software issue, or something specific with the program I wrote for you, I will also help.  I made an unspoken/unwritten promise to help you on this project.  I will see that through.

If someone including me asks questions, you will need to do a far better job of fully answering them.  It is ok to re-ask for clarification.  It is not ok to ignore a suggestion or question.  In the past, I have spent my many hours on your project fully qualifying a suggestion or asking a question I needed an answer to.  I even go to the trouble of putting it in numbered bullets so you can simply say 1. yes  2. no  3. 3.3V.  Typically you have not been willing to spend even a few minutes replying to ALL of the suggestion/question.  I will not be replying to your private messages any longer (you ignore my posts there about as much).  I will not do another video conference with you.  You've exceeded more than a hundred hours of my direct time. 

• In your notes if you consider the 100+ hours I've spent writing your code for you, and posts in your thread worthy of taking notes or bookmarking.
• By the hours I spent on a video conference working out your problems with you.
• The video I provided here explicitly showing you how to use your program in this thread.
• The dozens of references in this thread showing admin pages and your program pages.
• The hundreds of references in the on-line documentation for my library.  You will not find a better reference/manual/tutorial for any other library in the Arduino world.
• Or the simplest... the Serial output gives instructions for exactly the problem you are having.  Simply follow the instructions and copy/paste.  Which I told you in our video conference, on this thread and in the video of programming and usage of your app (somewhere in this thread).

Posted by: @thephilnewman

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P.S. In case you need to know, I am using version 5.3.2 of the Inq Portal and the software version I am using is version 0.9.9.

Don't know that it is the issue, as you have not explained the problems you're seeing.  But InqPortal is at 5.4.0.  Your IDE should have notified you of the update and it can be updated in the IDE using, Tools/Manage Libraries...

@inq @thephilnewman YES!!!!! There are several kinds of folks that burn me up. One of them is the person requiring help ignoring said help and, in fact, going off in another direction sometimes. Back in the day when I had my consulting business, I would smile as the billable hours were racked up by a user acting NOT in his/her own best interest. At $200 an hour, I didn't mind all that much, but here we get nothing but occasional abuse and almost never thanks.

I have over half a century of all kinds of experience, am an award winner and had a very successful career. There are lots of things I don't know, so if I ask Dennis a question about something I know he is knowledgeable in and his instructions are first paint your face green, then go outside and sing Ava Maria for 20 minutes, then that is what I will do because he is the EXPERT and I am the newbie!!!!!

Posted by: @zander

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I know he is knowledgeable in and his instructions are first paint your face green, then go outside and sing Ava Maria for 20 minutes, then that is what I will do because he is the EXPERT and I am the newbie!!!!!

You are way, way too kind!  I know my limitations and keep in my lane and defer to the other experts on this forum.  For hardware, I come here.  For the AI I'm trying to learn, I come here.  When it comes to topics on the ESP32, ESP32-CAM, and several other subjects, I don't even respond to them anymore, knowing you'll take care of it.  Cameras... I used to do it professionally (back in the film/chemical days) and was an exacting follower of Ansel Adam's Zone System in the dark-room.  A couple of times I fielded questions about cameras... until I saw your expertise!

@inq Also a huge fan of Ansel Adams. I used to have a large darkroom in the old days. Bought B&W film in 50 ft rolls and made my own canisters of 5, 10, 30 picture sizes for testing. SOOOOOO much easier with digital. Being in an old part of the city the water was bad for glossy work which was my norm so I had to sell it all off. Well that and a growing family meant the spare bedroom wasn't any more.

I think I have found a camera or two to use in my 'game camera' project but have not settled on a processor yet. The beauty is the camera supplier has software for almost all popular boards so I am re-evaluating.

Posted by: @zander

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Bought B&W film in 50 ft rolls and made my own canisters of 5, 10, 30 picture sizes for testing. SOOOOOO much easier with digital.

I was only doing it for beer money and taking pictures of varyingly clad co-eds.  Although I was primarily a Nikon man, I even got to the point of getting a 5"x7" bellows camera where you have to load each cartridge with the sheet of film in total darkness ahead of time... you had to compose the upside-down image on the frosted glass and then replace with the film cartridge.  Bracketing was too expensive and time consuming... even on the 35mm Nikons.  Digital these days... take, inspect, delete, re-take... yeah TONS easier!  And that doesn't even begin the digital ease over spotting and burning in the darkroom over a blank piece of paper, not know the results for some hours.  To most photographers these days a film camera might as well be a rotary phone... they simply wouldn't know how to operate it.

@inq You might want to revisit digital photography again someday if you have the time. I do NOT take any jpegs; looking at the image on the back of the camera is not something I often do. I shoot only RAW; all the fancy controls on the camera can be modified in post-processing with Lightroom (I rarely use Photoshop; it is the wrong tool (although I might now that Generative fill is available in PS))

A raw image is equivalent to a negative and for my Canon 7D II is close to 30 MegaBytes in size. The JPEG if I chose one would be already processed according to the camera settings and most of the data would be lost as the file is now only a few MB in size.

If Ansel was alive today he would be a huge Digital fan as he was both a Photographer and processor.

@zander

Posted by: @zander

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@inq You might want to revisit digital photography again someday if you have the time.

Of the skill sets I have... having The Eye is not one of them.  I know many professional photographers that have far more artistic ability than me, that can't get their next meal from it.  I have only... maybe 3 pictures that I consider worthy of taking up space on my walls.  I grew up in a town with tons of artists... mostly painting, pottery, wood-working.  Both of my closest childhood buddies are such artists.  I'm the odd-ball scientist, engineer among them or in that home town.  In my retirement house down-sizing, I could now rotate every painting I own on my walls every month and not see the same images again for years.  With my left-brain mentality, I was simply the idiot trying to hum in a barrel with the New York Philharmonic.  

Got to know my limitations. 😉 

@inq Well! not sure what I can say here other than I am deeply sorry for having upset you. The questions I have asked on here are because I have no idea of the answers, I really appreciate the time you have given me on this project and I have no intention of giving you a thumbs down. Thank you for answering my question as to why the numbers kept changing on the address, I will need to try and find out how to stop this happening as I dont use the elevator or train room with a frequency of more regularity than 24 hours, so yes this will be an ongoing problem for me. I have lots of questions regarding this project but I fear I am becoming a nuisance on here, which is entirely unintentional. If there are questions I have not answered that you have put to me, again I am sorry, I have spent most of my last three months working on this project and neglecting the model railway which is where the hobby began, I will not give up with the project though as I am now very close to seeing it come to fruition, having built the case and frame for it all to be mounted in. The problem for me now is that I have decided to use the Inq portal, and I am very grateful that you have given it to me, but this leaves me in a position whereby you are the only person whom I can ask for help, so if you decide to withdraw from helping me I am pretty much out on a limb so too speak. Once again please accept my sincere apologies.

Best Regards

Phil 

@inq OK, sorry to hear that. It's not usual, though, unless I have experienced the very unusual. Several of my closest friends in the technical world (all genius-level) were also fantastic at music, art, and photography. I used to play piano, but I can't draw worth a lick. I used to have the 'eye' and took some great pictures. I have been away from it for a few years now and have lost my eye, but I hope it will come back now that I will have more time to get out.

@thephilnewman Have you completely investigated the help links and other resources offered? What did you finally discover about the Admin page as it relates to your 'problem'.

I am assuming your problem is your phone can't connect since the address keeps changing. IS THAT CORRECT? If it is, then the Admin page has the solution do you know what it is? Does it work?

I have no special knowledge of the InqPortal, I am simply using common sense and reading what you said and what Dennis said.

Posted by: @thephilnewman

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I have lots of questions regarding this project but I fear I am becoming a nuisance on here, which is entirely unintentional.

If you ask pointed questions and give the details we require to give you an intelligent answer, I'm sure everyone on here including me will wish to see your project through.  There is obvious interest.  There are RR enthusiast on here that are probably eating this up without so much as a whisper or thumbs up.  I sincerely doubt the problems you have now are software related, but until you state the problems, I can't speculate what the eventual answer will be.  

1. Sounds like you have communications back - Router understanding problem fixed.
2. Settings lost - The calibration page is a nice-ity that most people here would not have written for even themselves.  They would have just kept trying those settings and re-hard coding them into the program and re-compiling.  I expect you will be fine-tuning to your equipment for a long time.  I felt the calibration page would be far more efficient of your time.  You should be taking screen shots or writing down your settings so you can re-enter them if necessary.  If at some point, you get stable settings, you can easily hard-code them into the program so they never need to get re-entered.  Not sure this is advisable, I expect something this construction complex will sag and/or deflect over time.  However, by entering into the hard-code, you would have a baseline that have the levels pretty close.
3. Whatever problem with stops you're having... is more likely a hardware wiring issue, but that is yet to be determined.  We will need more exacting steps that you perform and exactly what you see happening.  You may want to revisit the video I provided you somewhere in your thread to make sure you have the basics working.

Posted by: @thephilnewman

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The problem for me now is that I have decided to use the Inq portal, and I am very grateful that you have given it to me, but this leaves me in a position whereby you are the only person whom I can ask for help, so if you decide to withdraw from helping me I am pretty much out on a limb so too speak.

Even if I died tomorrow... this would not be true.  InqPortal is just a generalized webserver library and communications system.  You don't need to understand Mac OS or Windows to use them effectively.  It is available in the Arduino Library Manager.  It will always be there and I have no capability of removing it even if I wanted to.  The source code for your project is the entire logic for making your project run.  At less than 300 well-commented lines and segregated into descriptive functions, it is so simple, most everyone here can read, fix or enhance it.  If you would take the time to learn how to program on an Arduino, a novice could master the code.  Even converting to some other web server library could readily be done by several here.  

Posted by: @zander

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@inq OK, sorry to hear that. It's not usual, though, unless I have experienced the very unusual. Several of my closest friends in the technical world (all genius-level) were also fantastic at music, art, and photography. I used to play piano, but I can't draw worth a lick. I used to have the 'eye' and took some great pictures. I have been away from it for a few years now and have lost my eye, but I hope it will come back now that I will have more time to get out.

My formal training is not software.  While in that career, I didn't see any artistic people.  When I made the change over to software development, I was amazed about all the musically gifted people.  The numbers were definitely not an outlier.  There must be something between software development and music.  Me... I can't carry a tune in a barrel.  

The one thing I found true early on was that I had a knack for visualizing in 3D.  How something should be designed, how it would fit into a larger structure and not need to be re-designed because it ran into something else.  While I can't free-hand draw, or paint, I seem to be able to sculpt.  I'm now taking what few classes around here that I can working with clay.  It seems to be about the only thing artistic I can do.  

@zander hi up until a couple of hours ago I had no idea about the address changing. But what @inq said about the router giving out a different number every so often makes complete sense now. Albeit it has cost me many hours of time and frustration trying to work out why something wasn't working when It had worked fine a couple of days previously and I had changed nothing other than turning the unit off and then back on again. The first time it happened I had been punching the numbers of the address in for what seemed like hours with it never connecting and then from somewhere out of the blue I saw the address had changed? I unknowingly at that time assumed, wrongly as well that something must have changed on the Inq portal, anyway I got it all up and running again, and then I had a train friend come round to visit the other day, he casually asked me how it was going, and I proceeded to give him a demonstration (Not a good move) the address must have changed again anyway he went away having seen nothing other than me typing in the same wrong address for half an hour. At which point I thought the ESP8266 unit must have been faulty, so I purchased another and a spare just in case, this time the problem was compounded as I lost all my measurements in the Inq portal plus it was over two months ago I had done all the setting up. Bottom line I have got in a real pickle, now trying to get back to where I was a while back.

Cheers Phil