No, this is not new. Back in October last year, Banggood sent this little, inexpensive WiFi Escam auto-tracking PTZ pan-and-tilt 1080p night vision camera to me and for reasons beyond me I did nothing with it. I’m sorting my stuff to take away with me this summer and I was…
RX-3 Lite V2 Body-worn CCTV Camera
ReWire Security recently sent me their model RX-3 Lite V2 Body-worn CCTV Camera. In case you’re wondering what that is – it’s a small body-worn audio-video-recording camera weighing less than 150g (plus harness) – offering 11 hours of HD video recording on a single charge. Yes you could record yourself…
Eachine E520S GPS WIFI Quadcoptor
Let me tell you a little about the nice-looking Eachine E520S GPS WIFI FPV With 4K/1080P HD Camera Quadcopter which recently arrived for me from Banggood – I WAS going to save this for the summer in Spain but as Banggood have a sale on right now I figured you…
Perfect Prime IR0005 IR Camera
The left photo below is what my IR0005 camera thinks of EU Chief Negotiator Michel Barnier on TV – not a lot it would seem. Below-right is the camera itself in it’s case along with USB lead, manual and strap. I received my (not inexpensive) IR0005 camera from Perfect Prime…
AWOW A60 E27 9W RGBW lights and Tasmota
Setting up RGB lights to work with Tasmota is not always as smooth as it might possibly be. Check here and you will see in this Tasmota template, a clear reference to the AWOW A60 E27 9W RGBW light So, simple enough, apply the template? {“NAME”:”AWOW 9W RGBW”,”GPIO”:[0,0,0,0,37,40,0,0,38,0,39,0,0],”FLAG”:0,”BASE”:18} Well, yes…
Argon ONE Case for Raspberry Pi 4 Updated
The Argon ONE case is very pretty (but then it is not cheap so you’d expect that). It has variable control over the built-in fan and I had to ramp up the settings as the fan was initially off even though the case was very warm – now the whole…
A Better Raspberry Pi Case?
Over the years I must’ve had every cheap plastic case going for my various Raspberry Pis, from clear cases through bright red expensive looking perspex, black, orange, you name it. Until now, sizes were pretty much universal and would even fit some of the Not-Raspberry PIs. But now, all change.…
More Zigbee Learning (or not)
Elsewhere I’ve just started to write about Zigbee – the low-energy RF communication alternative to WiFi and 433Mhz radio control of various smart devices. To make a start, I’m using my normal Raspberry Pi arrangement with the addition of a small pre-programmed dongle from Itead which works with the widely…
GL-iNet Spitz 4G LTE Smart Router
I’m impressed already – as a long-term occasional user of the GL-iNet Mango travel router, I thought I’d give their upmarket products a look. The Spitz is, to LOVELY at least to look at. Check pricing in your area. Tiny and open-source, the Spitz arrived in up-market packaging, complete with…
Blitzwolf BW-SS4 1-2-way Smart Switch
Maybe I’m just fascinated with the name Blitzwolf but here I am with another gadget from the company – I use lots of Blitzwolf gadgets – I didn’t even bother with the Blitzwolf APP which will do exactly what you expect of a smart controller, Instead I took a chance…
New 8GB RPi4, USB3 Boot now WORKS on all RPi4
What’s new? If you read through you will find I finally got USB boot all working using a 2GB RPi4 with various ways to boot my RPi4 – “rpi-cloned” from one master SD. The SD, SD-in-USB3, USB3 stick, USB3 HD,USB3 Hybrid Drive, USB3 SSD. Why bother with all of this?…
Blitzwolf BW-PSSD1 256GB USB3 SSD
A very exciting start to my week… my new (first ever in my case) portable Solid State Drive just arrived for my Raspberry Pi 4 – BlitzWolf® BW-PSSD1 SSD 256GB USB 3.1 Gen 1 High Speed Hard Drive with Type-C According to Royal Mail the unit came from Online Retailer…
ZemiSmart Lamps , Tasmota and Retail Therapy
The original of this blog entry has lots of interesting stuff but as I’ve now been through even MORE RGB lamps from various suppliers – this requires an update (June 14, 2020). Zemismart, as you will see further down, do several decent RGBW lights of the type that offer proper…
Fun with Colours
Colour fun I’ve been playing with these oddly named programs for ASCII text and pretty colours on my Raspberry Pi machines – check them out: cowsay figlet toilet lolcat For example: sudo apt-get install -y cowsay figlet toilet On the RPi as it happens, the first two were already installed.…
Hands-free washing using inexpensive foam
This subject is more easily covered in video so here goes – all the links are included, I’m having great fun with these gadgets which combine to provide a clean, hygienic hands-free washing experience – quite topical right now. Above, an inexpensive USB-powered hands-free foam dispenser using commonly-available cleaner (supermarket)…
Owon XDG2035 Function Generator
I just received my Owon XDG2035 only to realise they yet don’t have it advertised on their UK site – however, Eleshop EU has it advertised at 289 Euros + tax (and their photo is better than mine – other than that I have zero connection with them) – I…
Another Itead Sonoff and Week now with Zigbee
Early June 2020 I received my long-awaited Sonoff Zigbee bridge along with Itead‘s pre-programmed Zigbee CC2531 USB dongle which means I am starting to write about low-power-consumption Zigbee devices including some from ZemiSmart. This update July 6, 2020 mentions the experimental Tasmota template for the Sonoff Zigbee Bridge. First things…
Stone Technology 7″ Intelligent TFT Displays
This week I received a very well packed 7″ TFT display from Beijing Stone Tecnhology Co. Ltd. The 800*600px colour display shown below came complete with a power/signal lead (and a spare), USB adaptor for programming (with 12v power socket which, it seems, will tolerate 6v to 35v DC, not…
Tuya-Convert on RPi or Orange Pi Zero
Elsewhere in the blog I’ve referred to Tuya-Convert – which I have been running on the Raspberry Pi. Today Antonio (Mr Shark – based in Italy) and I took on the MINOR task of putting Tuya-Convert on an otherwise unused Orange Pi Zero. SO – what is Tuya-Convert? Let’s say…
Windows Update May 2020 – a Big One?
May 2020 Windows upgrade is out and at least here in the UK, is available – in “Windows update” and I have just finished upgrading six PCs. Not a lot of really exciting stuff but the updates to the Windows WLS might be worth checking if you want to run…