While waiting for my new Raspberry Pi 3 board to arrive so I can blog about it – I thought I’d jot down some thoughts following a conversation with a pal of mine in Canada. Today, a new Raspbian release came out supporting the 64-bit Raspberry Pi 3. Hopefully it…
Month: February 2016
Raspberry Pi 3
So firstly, in case you’ve been on a desert island, what is a Raspberry Pi 3 and why do you need one right now? The Raspberry Pi is a general purpose tiny computer with USB, Ethernet, audio, HDMI etc and this works using an SD card to store the operating…
The Saturday Update
For those interested – I’ve been quiet the last couple of days as we’re ploughing ahead getting the new office up and running – got walls up and ceiling almost done – got power and Ethernet in last last night and today we’re off to get wall sockets and worktops.…
Nextion Progress
Things have come quite a way since my first stab at using the Itead Nextion displays with an ESP8266. I now have a fully working thermostat display running on MQTT – but I’m beginning to wonder if 56KBaud is pushing it a bit for the software UART. Now that I’m…
SUDO without Password
Sometime I wonder… So we have the SUDO command to keep everyone happy in Linux (Debian in this case) by not using ROOT – and on the Raspberry Pi that’s just fine – but every other board I’ve tested you seem to spend more time putting in the password. Then…
From Zero to Star Trek
Or controlling your IOT by voice. 2 days ago I was no-where with this – and today I “stand on the cusp” of having full voice control with just one minor issue bugging me – and as this subject has received so much attention I thought I’d better try to…
Coding the Nextion
At the risk of repeating myself (apologies to regular readers for this first para) the Nextion display is in fact a range of touch-LCD displays from small to large. The thing they all have in common is a a complete programming environment where, by downloading a desktop graphical tool, you…
Node Red Grandfather Clock
So I was thinking about all those wasted cycles on my Pi – which is speech and MP3 equipped, As I sat quietly coding (my wife Maureen is in the USA right now) listening to the hard disk on the Sky box chunking away (well, when they said you could…
Free Dials and Buttons
I wonder if we can all do each other favour here. Every time I go looking for buttons, slide switches, gauges etc for my projects – like the Nextion – at least 90% of the so called FREE ICONs and PNGs – by the time you get to it –…
IOT Speech recognition
Here’s a thought – now this might be available – but I can’t find it.. Most of us have phones – some Android, some Apple, few Microsoft. So sticking with Android for now – the latest Android phones (I have the HTC One M8 with Android 6.0 which is marvellous)…
Enter the Pixie Pro
This morning I went off to the post office to pick my new new Pixie Pro – making sure that the tax man got his share and that the post office got their rip-off “handling fee” of £8 – yes that’s £8 pounds not dollars. Not that you have any…
Cheap Raspberry Pi
Now before you say anything – they don’t even know I’m writing this!! Remember when I was in Chicago a while back (well, you’ll only remember if you’re a regular reader)… I bought a Pi Zero and a Raspberry Pi dirt cheap at somewhere called MicroCenter in Chicago. Well they’re…
Blynking Wonderful
As of yesterday, a new release of the Blynk App has been released which makes me want to look at this again. Regular readers know that I’m into the idea of using a central controller for home control – so that instead of trying to give every peripheral every feature…
Wifi Nextion
Regular readers will remember me ranting about a little board we were making to fit on the back of a Nextion to make it wireless. Well yesterday was a very productive day – the boards came back from China. Somehow they’d managed to disconnect the top floor layer from earth…
Monday Update
Node-Red-Contrib-UI: Just a quick update … not heard anything from Andrei re: node-red-contrib-ui recently – I could not get his experimental version to work and I’ve heard nothing since. I do hope the project is still alive. I have high hopes for it but right now the display is a…
Even More Sonoff
Having read the comments in “More Sonoff” it seemed that with the Sonoff RF – there might be a slightly easier way to program it rather than holding the board, holding a connector in place and trying to short a pair of contacts together with a spare LED. In the…
More Sonoff
Waiting for the guys in China to come back from holiday, but this turned up today – a low-voltage version of the Sonoff. At this point I’m going to make some comments based on the PCB – see if you can come up with something better.. The connector bottom left…
The FriendlyArm NanoPi 2 Fire
A package arrived for me this morning – a BIG one – and in it a little box containing the new FriendlyArm NanoPi 2 Fire, http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=96 Well, you’ve heard of lots of these by now – yet another Pi-like board. This one has a nice feature – it is SMALL…
Location location location
Could be my lucky day today… not only does the Orange Pi PC work but I’ve been talking to a pal of mine Peter Oakes (check his videos) in Canada… I know zilch about Linux apart from what seems like several thousand commands I’ve learned recently (probably a dozen) be…
Orange Pi PC Setup
Here’s a new video as we’ve changed the script since the one I had up here yesterday – it takes a long time to do the install and so here is what you get when you’ve done the install. The script now does it all. So – take a look…