Friday Rant: The New “Raspberry Pi Pico” trades on the name “Raspberry Pi” which many of us find to be a cost-effective home controller, thankfully widely supported by lkots of third parties. But this is not a Raspberry Pi – it is a small controller – the price touted on…
Banggood 30W DIY Laser Engraving Machine
Described as a 30w/20w DIY Laser Engraving Machine this inexpensive engraver caught my attention over the Christmas holidays and here it is. Normally, Banggood provide brand names but in this case I guess they are branding it as their own product. I note the laser module has tick boxes for…
More Printing Goodness – and now the Crealty LD-002H
This write-up is about the Creality 3D® LD-002H LCD Resin 3D Printer. I can’t find any reference to one of one of the originally promoted features in the manual – i.e. WiFi. So should I simply point you back to my 2020 sprawling entry on the Creality 3D® LD-002R LCD…
HK1 RBOX R1 5G WiFi Android 10 TV Box
Before I delve into this new box from Banggood – let’s go back a step: I’ve had quite a number of Android TV boxes over the years and there are lots on the second-hand market. But something to consider… I just had to bin two boxes that were not that…
More New Year Gadgets – 12 Inch LED Ring Wall Clock
I just received this US/EU Plug 12/24 hour 12 Inch LED Ring Wall Clock from Banggood (pre-assembled), complete with a US plug – but as that’s a separate USB charger it’s not that important – they do supply both EU and USA USB adaptors. You may be aware that I’ve…
Bakeey POCO X3 NFC Case
This lovely, transparent (with armoured black edges) Bakeey case for the Poco X3 phone was always going to be a difficult one to write about. I can show you the case but I need my phone to take a photo so I can’t show it ON the phone 🙂 If…
Bakeey 8-in-1 USB-C Hub Docking Station Adaptor
This inexpensive Bakeey Adaptor does everything – HDMI out, RJ45 network out, TF, SD, a pair of USB 3 outputs and two USB-C outputs – one of which is for power charging (PD – or POWER DELIVERY). This slim unit has USB-C input. In fact the only thing wrong is…
RGB Smart Socket – EH?
I think I’ve seen it all now. What’s an RGB Smart Plug I hear you say? Well, it is just what it sounds like. It’s a smart socket – 3840W (resistive) max with power monitoring – so nothing new there, but they’ve added RGB LEDs inside the socket itself for…
Athom Smart Socket pre-Tasmota’d and Smart Light
I’m so excited about this so I’ll dive straight in. The company is called ATHOM and they make smart sockets and lights pro-programmed with TASMOTA. I took the smartsocket out of the box, plugged it into the mains, told my phone to look for access points and it found “tasmota_D3F950-6480”.…
Second 2021 Treat – a New Doorbell
Regular readers may recall one of last year’s blog entries called “A ZemiSmart Weekend” in which I wrote about, amongst other things, my new (at the time) doorbell, a simple kinetic door push (no batteries) with a UK-plug-based “bell”. This was back in April 2020 and I bought it from…
BigTimer
Node–RED is a fantastic and powerful yet easy to use programming tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways. For more information on Node-Red go to the Node-Red site. BigTimer is my own creation and is (IMHO) the most powerful and best-ever, most…
NodeMCU 10-pack Bargain – first treat of the New Year
My first January 2021 present-to-me arrived between Christmas and NYE while we were hiding at the coast – and I’ve just made a start at testing this pack of ten inexpensive ESP8266-based NodeMCU boards. If you’re not familiar with these and similar products, they are a very popular and generally…
Merry Christmas and a New Poco X3
First things first – I hope all of my subscribers and new readers had a wonderful Christmas – I’m sure it will be FAR from the best on record but hopefully Santa brought you some new gadgets as he did for me. Top of the list for me HAS to…
The rugged Doogee S68 Pro with Titanium Sides
This is a happy story as I’m sure you’re all sick to death of hearing about everyone’s favourite virus – far better to read about great gadgets… This first part is about the new phone I recently received from Banggood, the Doogee S68 Pro (Global version) Smartphone. Is this a…
The IOTCRICKET from ThingsOnEdge.COM
See update at the end – and warning – this is a long story: Of course we’ve all seen this form factor before – ESP8266 on a board with power and antenna, FLASH etc.. The ESP-12 is only one of many and now we have a new one… The biggy…
The YeeLight and node-red-contrib-yeelite-compat-hue
My first 9W E27 RGB+White WiFi Yeelight from Banggood arrived this week. The plan is to run this on Tasmota firmware but as I’m having trouble (as are others) with my Tuya-convert hardware at the moment I ran it initially on the Android YEELIGHT app. Not ideal but they allow…
Crealty 3D LD-002R LCD Resin Printer and MORE
For those looking in for the first time, The LD-002R is not to be confused with the LD-002H which has improved speed and slightly increased cost – so we are looking at a USB connected printer which accepts files on a memory stick for printing. In the beginning How hard…
Smart Devices for 2021 and Beyond
As most of you will know there are a large number of Smart devices out there today -for example – smartplugs which can be run over Zigbee or WiFi – I’ll concentrate only on WiFi in here. Smartplugs vary from 10A capacity which are good for lighting but only useful…
USB-C to USB 3 Adaptors
Seen these? If not, you might find this useful. Sure all the new portable kit today comes complete with USB-C – but what if your computer isn’t 100% up to date? Still using USB 3? I am, so when I found myself with a spare 7-in-1 USB hub, I figured…
VIGOTEC VG-L7X 20W Laser Engraver for Christmas
The full title of this engraver on Banggood’s site is the Vigotec VG-L7X 20W Laser Engraver CNC Router Desktop Automatic Here below is the mandatory box photo complete with thin “manual” which to be fair is generally in decent English. On first opening the package, I found this initial installation…