Part 1: At $6, the Electrodragon “WIFI IOT Relay Board based on ESP8266” looks like a force to be reckoned with, offering WIFI control over two 10 amp relays. But what about the SONOFF from ITEAD? How do they compare? Making use of their own incredibly cheap power supply…
Month: April 2016
Status update
It may seem like I’ve been quite the past week – but having arrived safely in Spain we’ve had lots to do. However I have done some updates to the “home control 2016” blog entry as I’ve implemented some fixes to the node-red-contrib-esplogin node. For those of you unfamiliar with…
North East Maker Faire 2016
I could not be there at the Maker Faire UK in the Centre for Life in Newcastle – but thanks to my spies – it’s great to see so many people there. Apparently this couple on the left are into ESP8266 and got some ideas from the blog. Glad you…
PWM Woes
Just in case anyone is having issues with the ESP8266 SDK and PWM. Problem now “solved” but you might find this interesting. For many months now I’ve been using the PWM on the ESP8266 successfully, so much so that I’ve not tested it and just recently I’ve noticed it…
Simple Serial Terminal lost blog
For reasons beyond me the original article on my serial terminal, originally put together when I was messing with LUA, has disappeared from the blog entirely – and so here’s a quickly updated version but this is no longer developed as I use YAT which is GREAT.. So above right…
Installing the Works – The Script
This is the original blog entry on the home control script – now replaced… https://tech.scargill.net/a-christmas-script/ Please ONLY use the script referred to in the new blog entry!
esp8266 Annual Awards
Just a note to say THANK YOU to everyone who voted for the Nextion Wifi Touch Display over at esp8266.com in their first annual competition. I just found out this morning that we won second prize, beaten to the top only by the excellent esp8266 Basic Interpreter – a great…
Track Broadband Outage in Node Red
Actually I could have given this a range of titles – as the following is useful in a range of situations. But first let me explain my problem: The problem: I’ve been having broadband issues. The broadband cuts out for a few minutes without warning and then reconnects. I just…
WIFI Public and Private Access Point
Many moons ago when we first bought our place in Spain (6 days and counting) I bought something called an OM2P – a small white WIFI Access Point. I’m talking several years ago. What I was after was private WIFI and public WIFI – something I could charge a nominal…
Duff lights
As everyone in here is into technology – and as that means you’re more than likely to buy LED lighting for your home, I thought I’d take this opportunity to issue a helpful warning – especially for those in 240v AC areas. While I have generally had great success with…
Pong Detection
These are good fun – FC-22 Harmful Gas Detector I just received 2 of them – they run from 5v, using around 0.7 watts. I just bought them on a whim as we were busy joking about cat poo. At the time our new cat Chloe (ragdoll) was having stomach…
PubNub versus MQTT
Today I’ve been playing with PubNub. This is a something-vaguely-like MQTT like service. Now if you’ve read my articles you’ll know I’m not keen on public services for IOT – what happens if they go down? That’s your fridge on the blink… but this one looks interesting because they have…
Flashing HC 2019 Code
This entry is now incorporated into the main Home Control blog entry. This is for the people who’ve been trying out my software (or thinking of trying it out) on the ridiculously cheap (£1.40) but very reliable, powerful and comprehensive ESP12 WIFI processor board and those who’ve gone ahead and…
PHPSYSINFO on Raspberry Pi
Just to save anyone getting caught out with out of date information, if you want to install phpsysinfo on your Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 running Jessie… the picture below is self-explanatory – simple to install and some worthwhile info. RPI-Monitor is another useful monitoring tool. sudo apt-get update &&…
KILLER KILLER
As someone has put up an article entitled “ESP8266 Killer?” I thought I’d better step in.. There are two boards to look out for on Ebay – the EMW3165 – http://goo.gl/ccWgtT and the NL6621-Y1 – http://goo.gl/qdMhtm I noted one article suggested the EMW3165 was “just a dollar more than the…
Microwave Radar
As soon as one mentions “microwave radar” I’ll bet you’re thinking “expensive” – well how does under 2 quid sound… http://goo.gl/BgwcbZ These little devils are movement detectors, bought from Ali Express on a whim and they use the PCB as the antenna (3Ghz) – hence the ridiculously low price. So…
ESP12 and Memory
Anyone writing large projects with the ESP units in C (and probably in other languages without necessarily realising it) will have come across the problems of .TEXT memory. This is the RAM used to store functions. Functions are stored in their own part of RAM called .TEXT memory and it…