Thursday, August 11, 2022

My oldest brother passed away last week

Frank Ross Hoadley was born November 3, 1944 to Joseph and Frances Hoadley in Saint Louis Mo. where Doctor Joe was finishing his residency. The family would relocate to Gillette Wy after Doc Joe finished his service as an Army surgeon.

While growing up, Frank enjoyed hunting antelope, deer and rabbits on the family homestead ranch south of Gillette.

Frank was schooled in the Campbell County school system and completed his senior year of high school as a foreign exchange student to Australia.

Frank continued his education at the University of Wyoming receiving a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature. Frank would stay on at the University for a few more years while serving as a campus police officer before taking a position as a detective in the Laramie police department.

Frank was later hired by the city of Laramie to work as the City Manager where he served for several years.

Always looking for new opportunities Frank took a position with Boettcher and Associates in Denver, Colorado.

Frank left investment banking to take up the position of Capital Finance Director for the state of Wisconsin where he would serve under four different governors from 1988 until his retirement in 2013.

Frank was very highly regarded by his peers and considered a standard bearer of state debt management. As Capital Finance Director Frank introduced a number of innovations including the introduction of extendible municipal commercial paper. He was a champion of strong issuer disclosure and plain language in financial documents. His leadership and guidance in the Government Finance Officers Association was very influential. In 2008 Frank was given a lifetime achievement award by The Municipal Forum of New York.

Congresswoman Gwen Moore of Wisconsin is submitting a statement honoring Frank Hoadley into the United States Congressional Record.

Frank is preceded in death by his father Joseph, mother Frances, and his first wife Myrna Crout. He is survived by his sister Jeanette, brothers David and Clyde, his wife Elizabeth, and daughters Marci and Jessica.

Frank passed away August 4, 2022 while vacationing with his wife in Scotland.

Friday, August 05, 2022

Completion of a long project


This is an electronic weather station of sorts that I assembled from a variety of electronic parts and soldered together on a protoboard.

At the heart of the weather station is a HUZZAH 32 made by Adafruit in Manhattan New York. The HUZZAH 32 is an ESP32 microprocessor with WiFi hosted on an Adafruit Feather wing breakout board along with a USB connector, a battery connecter, a voltage regulator, and pinouts making the ESP32 microprocessor very easy to use. The ESP32 can be programmed using the Arduino IDE or Python.

I also added an Adafruit Ada Logger which is a Real Time Clock with battery backup and a micro SD card reader/writer. I am only using the SD card feature.

I connected a DHT22 digital temperature and humidity sensor. It is easy to use and works very well.

Then I connected a BMP388 pressure and temperature sensor. This did not work according to specifications but with some arithmetic I was able compensate for its error.

The really cool sensor is the PMSA003I air quality sensor that measures particulate mater in the air. It measures dust, smoke, pollen, etc. from 10 micrograms per cubic meter of air to as little as 0.03 micrograms per cubic meter of air.

Finally I wrote a program to pull it all together. The program does more than just read data from all the sensors, it also saves the reading to the micro SD memory card and makes the readings available via a web page accessible over WiFi.

It took much longer to develop the program than it did to wire and solder everything together -- which took several days.

I might eventually add a rain gauge and weather camera to it but for now I consider the project to be complete.