The universe is not as funny as it thinks

So I thought I was almost finished with the base software for the snitchboxes, but the universe heard me say that and chuckled to itself, knowing full well about the surprise it had laying in wait for me on the very next page.

I don't want to turn this into a programming lecture, so I'll just say enough about the problem that other Arduino developers will understand what I'm talking about: Strings are evil.

But for the rest of you, what it boils down to is that a long-standing and well known problem with the Arduino coding system rose up to bite me right at the finish line. It then took me the better part of a week to figure out an alternate strategy. (It should have been done in just a day or two, but I had family visiting and didn't want them to spend too much of their vacation just sitting around waiting for me. :-)

Anyway, I eventually slew the Arduino dragon, and now I have a very solid foundation that I can use for designing telemetry-style device projects. Once I've proven the technology by using it to build some snitchboxes, I'll probably post the foundation code to GitHub as its own project, so other developers can use it too. (And when I do, I'll try to remember to come back and put a link to it here.)

While that battle was playing out, I also received the last parts shipment I needed, so I'm now completely ready to start putting it together.

In fact, I think I'll go work on it now.