Did Thingiverse shadow ban my models?

As a hobby, I do some 3d modelling generally around small designs I think might be useful. They include things I make to use around the house, or just general interests of mine. 

Recently, I did a couple models in regard to window screens. These models quickly got a lot of attention with views and downloads. For a few months the numbers just kept growing... until suddenly it stopped. 

Download/View Activity

Download/View Activity with Markings

Maybe Thingiverse shadow banned me, making it harder to find my models in their search, but here are a few other possibilities that probably make more sense. 

Weather: For many, going into winter is not the time to be installing window screens. The application of such a thing is generally more of a spring/summer necessity. This could have contributed to a reduction in activity.  

Third-party Referral Sources: There are websites that aggregate models across different platforms for the purpose of comprehensive searches (and monetizing users). These sites may have been contributing to my numbers and have possibly modified their code (i.e. yeggi.com) for reasons only known to them.

Thingiverse Updates: There was a thingiverse update around this time. It is entirely possibly that the update changed things in relation to how models are suggested to site visitors. Another option with this update is that they are actively trying to reduce the number of bots downloading models for the sake of duplicating your work, which may have been part of this update.

At the end of the day I provide these models for free with the hopes that maybe they will help someone else solve a problem or give someone a starting point to make something even better. 

Overall, it is hard to say exactly why the numbers dropped like they did, and we likely will never know. But one thing is for certain. It won't do any good to assume the worst. 

ESP8266 Captive Portal, Static Serve, and Websockets

While working on a toy for my dog, I wanted to set up an AP with captive portal. This took a little bit because a lot of examples out there were a bit out of date and did not work properly. The main issue was that the CaptiveRequestHandler class was not specifically handling Android and iOS captive handler endpoints. 

I changed the class like this and it worked fine: 

class CaptiveRequestHandler : public AsyncWebHandler {

public:

  CaptiveRequestHandler() {}

  virtual ~CaptiveRequestHandler() {}

  bool canHandle(AsyncWebServerRequest *request){

    String url = request->url();

    return (url == "/generate_204" || url == "/hotspot-detect.html");

  }

    void handleRequest(AsyncWebServerRequest *request) {

        if (!request) {

            Serial.println("Received null request");

            return; // Return early if the request is null

        }

        // Check for specific requests (e.g., Android's `/generate_204`)

        if (request->url() == "/generate_204" || request->url() == "/hotspot-detect.html") {

            // Redirect to the captive portal (ESP8266’s IP)

            request->redirect("http://192.168.4.1/index.html");

        }

    }

};

The canHandle was modified to only handle these methods, otherwise to return false. This is important because later we want to handle requests with other handlers. 

That said, I also added a static serve handler:

WiFi.softAP(SSID);

dnsServer.start(53, "*", WiFi.softAPIP());

server.addHandler(new CaptiveRequestHandler()).setFilter(ON_AP_FILTER);//only when requested from AP

server.serveStatic("/", LittleFS, "/").setDefaultFile("index.html");

This meant my index.html page would request other assets (images, css, js) and they would be served. One thing to note is that in order for this to work on a platformio project, you need to update your platform.io config with your (filesystemboard_build.filesystem = littlefs)

Finally because we are allowing handlers, we can setup the web sockets. 

// Set up WebSocket

ws.onEvent(onEvent);

server.addHandler(&ws);  // Add WebSocket handler to the server

// Start the server

server.begin();

Slightly Painful - Painless Mesh for ESP32

While working on a mesh networking project, I decided to give Painless Mesh a try. 

I ran into whole bunch of issues in PlatformIO for some reason, so I resorted to using ArduinoIDE 2. 

The first weird thing was that I got a message saying: 

Failed to install library: 'PubSubClient:2.8.0'.

Error: 2 UNKNOWN: destination dir C:\Users\CorrLabs\Documents\Arduino\libraries\PubSubClient already exists, cannot install

The solution to this was just to manually delete the folder and reinstall the library. For some reason there was a library already downloaded, but Arduino IDE could not utilize it.

Then I ran into this one:

wifi.hpp:49:14: error: 'class WiFiClass' has no member named 'setAutoConnect'; did you mean 'setAutoReconnect'?

Fortunately, I found a comment by a person named luckymatt who had the answer to this. Basically the problem is just with compatibility changes between versions. 

At this point, I was able to compile and flash my ESP32-WROOM32 dev board with the Painless Mesh MQTT example.

References:

https://forum.arduino.cc/t/error-with-wifi-hpp-when-compiling-painless-mesh-code/1248608/13

Visual Studio Installer: ERROR: The system cannot find the file specified - following system restore

Problem: 

A long story short, a bad USB adapter killed motherboard USB headers. The system was old enough that buying a new CPU/motherboard would be as much as buying a used motherboard. I decided to do a new build, and with a fresh install my OS. While installing Visual Studio Community 2022, I found that the installer would download files, but then die when trying to perform the install. I had earlier had a BSOD issue with a PCI card, and ended up running a repair on my system. This messed up a lot of my just installed applications including Visual Studio. Oddly, the installer did not list a specified file, the rest of the error popup was blank.

Solution: 

After researching their cleanup tool (which you can only get if you successfully installed VS) and reading a couple SO posts, I decided to just try something. I renamed my application directories for 

    C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs 

    C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 

and tried the installer again. This time it worked. 

Keep in mind this will likely mess with any settings you have already in place. 

Addressable LED Strip Odd Colors with Arduino | Weird Behavior

I was trying to run some test code using a strip of addressable LEDs and my Arduino, but every time I ran the program, I got odd colors and the last LED color was green. Sometimes I would get a stronger color in each LED - especially when trying to set them to all white. In my case it was Red, Green, Blue (repeating 1 time) then all the other LEDs were unlit.

It dawned on me (later than I would have liked) that the order of values was wrong for the LED strip I was using (you can visibly see the large White diode in each white square). I had initialized my LED strip (using NeoPixel) to NEO_GRB instead of NEO_GRBW as my strip has a dedicated white LED. My major mistake here was that I thought I had a strip of WS2812B LEDs but really they were SK6812RGBW LEDs. 

Adafruit_NeoPixel strip(NUM_LEDS, LED_PIN, NEO_GRBW + NEO_KHZ800);

void setup()

{

strip.begin(); // INITIALIZE NeoPixel strip object (REQUIRED)

  strip.show();  // Turn OFF all pixels ASAP

  strip.setBrightness(MAX_BRIGHTNESS);

}

void loop()

{

auto color = strip.Color(255, 0, 0, 255); //  Optional 4th param is White

  for (int i = 0; i < strip.numPixels(); i++)

  {                                

    strip.setPixelColor(i, color); //  Set pixel's color (in RAM)

    strip.show();                  //  Update strip to match

    delay(50);                     //  Pause for a moment

  }

}

SiteGround SSH Login Trouble - Permission denied (publickey).

Problem:

Working with a company that uses SiteGround for hosting, we setup SSH access on the website using keys. The SiteGround system forces a specific SSH passphrase for your key pair and it appears to be randomly generated, which is fine and considered fairly secure to my knowledge. 

After setting up SSH config on my local machine and leaving things for a while, I came back to find that I could not login anymore. I confirmed my access should still work and that nothing has changed with the keys or passphrase but I continued to get: 

Permission denied (publickey).

Solution:

New solution: try a pass phrase with limited special characters. This does require you to setup a new ssh key through the website, but has ultimately solved my issue. My original solution seemed to be that somehow logging in was associated with when the passphrase would work and when it wouldn't. This is not the case. I also talked to support but they were only able to verify that my IP address was not being blocked while debugging the issue. 

Original solution: For some reason, SiteGround requires you to log back in on the their website before you can login with SSH. If you are already logged in, then you may need to log out and back in. As a guess, I think this is probably just a way they have chosen to try and combat potential bad actors, but it certainly has a lot of friction to it. 

Process Explorer - DLL Inspection

 I've been working with a DLL I got that doesn't have very great documentation. After trying a couple different things (ILSPy, and custom python to load and print callable functions) and all failing, I asked the great chatGPT. It suggested Process Explorer. 

I started my application, then searched for the DLL. Once I found the DLL, I was able to right-click and examine it's properties. This loaded a window with two tabs, Image and Strings. To be honest, I'm not sure off the bat what those mean, and the data on each tab seemed to be the same as the other at quick glance, but I was able to find functions I knew existed along side functions that I was not aware of. 

Exercise caution when calling any undocumented functions in your DLL, they may produce undesirable or event irreversible results.