It turns out that tinkering and development is hard when the signals to be measured are located far from my desk and electronics workbench. The meter cabinet is located downstairs next to the front door, while my lab / playground is three half flights up (we live in a split-level house).
While bringing a laptop down for software development and upload would be easy, taking the scope down there and leaving it all hooked up for days on end… not fun.
Fortunately, there are ways to improve on this. One is to create a path for accessing the console during development with Thorsten von Eicken’s ESP-Link. The other trick is to use the JEM prototype board interactively, to peek and poke at its input pins and try and debug as much as possible that way.
Which is exactly what I’ve been doing lately:
It doesn’t remove the need to move the unit occasionally - to make hardware changes to it for example - but it should go a long way to making remote development possible!