July 2015 - Scargill's Tech Blog

UPS in Spain

July 29, 2015October 14, 2015 Peter ScargillSpain, Spanish, UPS10 Comments

UPS are SO never getting my business again Update 14/10/2015 Absolutely predictably, after promising delivery today – UPS have once again marked the tracking system as “incorrect address” and given up. I keep sending them simple Google map links and they keep writing back to say they cannot read…

ESP LIFESPAN

July 25, 2015 Peter ScargillESP-01, ESP-12, ESP-12E, ESP82662 Comments

Just a quick note – as a few of you have said you’ve had issues flashing ESP boards and some have worked then not worked etc… ensure you use the relevant pull ups and pull downs and the right voltages. As you know I do a LOT of work with…

ESP8266 Reliability and ID

July 24, 2015July 24, 2015 Peter ScargillESP-01, ESP-02, ESP-03, ESP-04, ESP-05, ESP-06, ESP-07, ESP-08, ESP-09, ESP-10, ESP-11, ESP-12, ESP-12E, ESP-13, ESP-201, ESP-210, ESP12, ESP8266, ESP8266 SDK9 Comments

Questions for you C programming ESP8266 guys re: the ESP SDK (1.2.0) and some possibly important info on WIFI and MQTT reliability. In the SDK: wifi_station_set_hostname wifi_station_get_hostname HOST ID…. If you do an IP scan on a windows network – ESP units will coming up as IP addresses – and…

Hackitt and Bodgitt discover Healthy Lighting

July 12, 2015September 3, 2015 Peter Scargillcolour temperature, ESP-01, ESP-02, ESP-03, ESP-04, ESP-05, ESP-06, ESP-07, ESP-08, ESP-09, ESP-10, ESP-11, ESP-12, ESP-12E, ESP-210, Kelvin, Led Lighting16 Comments

There has been a lot of talk in the press recently about the colour of lighting and it’s relevance to health. As far back as 2012, the BBC reported that NASA were to test “space-sleep colour-changing lights” on the international space station and since then there have been a number…

Espressif SDK 1.2.0

July 8, 2015 Peter ScargillESP8266, ESP8266 SDK8 Comments

Just today a new release of the SDK from Espressif along with a patch. I note they have brought back the watchdog controls. Tried it on our code and up to now it’s absolutely fine. Still no sign of the PWM_STOP() function I’m waiting for however. There is a one-liner…

Fab-Fest Boston August

July 8, 2015 Peter ScargillESP8266, Fab Fest, Fab Lab Conference

At the start of August I will be a guest of Espressif at the 11th Fab Lab Conference and Symposium in Boston. Espressif have asked me to do a 30 minute session talking about what we’ve been doing with the ESP8266 (which, as regular readers will know is quite a…

The Plan

July 6, 2015July 7, 2015 Peter ScargillLinux15 Comments

So here’s the plan… in my home control article I pretty much tell you what we’ve done with our ESP-12 boards – we’re expecting one with no mistakes arriving this week – artwork is in the blog – I’ll confirm once we’ve tested it that there are no sillies. The…

Accessing ESP8266 Arrays in FLASH

July 1, 2015July 1, 2015 Peter ScargillESP-01, ESP-02, ESP-03, ESP-04, ESP-05, ESP-06, ESP-07, ESP-08, ESP-09, ESP-10, ESP-11, ESP-12, ESP-12E, ESP-13, ESP-201, ESP-210, ESP12, ESP8266, Flash23 Comments

A new challenge – the answer to which I will post in here. Accessing an ESP8266 C array in FLASH – i.e. never touching RAM until you actually access something. One suggestion was to ensure you use 4-byte variables.. so I tried this – it compiled – the array is…

Pebble Time

July 1, 2015 Peter ScargillPebble Time

Just a slight diversion to tell you about my new Pebble Time watch. Pebble as you may be aware brought out a Kickstarter project some time ago which did well, a watch based on the same technology used in the Kindles – a black and white display that uses no…