Automation

Tech 19 Sep 2026 7 min read

Reliable ESP32 IR Air-Conditioner Control Needs Hysteresis and State Synchronization

An ESP32 can turn a conventional infrared air conditioner into a temperature-driven controller without modifying the AC itself. The basic signal path is simple: a room-temperature sensor feeds the ESP32, the firmware decides whether cooling is required, and an IR LED transmits the same kind of frame the handheld remote would send. The difficult part is not producing infrared light. It is keeping the control loop stable while working with an appliance whose IR protocol may encode the remote’s complete state in every transmission.

ESP32 Infrared

Software Engineering 10 Sep 2026 10 min read

Reconciliation Loops for Self-Healing Systems

Reconciliation Loops for Self-Healing Systems A one-shot operation works well when every step succeeds. Real systems are less cooperative. A process crashes after creating half its resources, an external API times out after accepting a request, an operator changes something manually, or a dependency becomes unavailable and recovers later. If correctness depends on one command completing perfectly, every interruption creates another recovery path to design and operate. A reconciliation loop uses a different model. Instead of saying, “perform these steps once,” the system repeatedly asks, “what should be true, what is true now, and what is the smallest safe action that moves reality toward the desired state?” That shift is useful for controllers, background jobs, provisioning systems, synchronizers, and any workflow where state can drift after the initial operation.

Software Engineering Reliability