Just a very quick one (and somewhere to park the conversation)– there’s a new Raspberry Pi update out promising a new smoother, simpler look, better video etc. Up to now it looks like the claim is correct. I have several RPI installations…including TightVNC and so I didn’t want to lose…
Month: September 2016
Arduino STM32
Having decided I needed a more powerful generic peripheral board than the Arduino, I sent off for some STM32 boards to China – they got lost in the post. Meantime my friend Aidan sent me a nice little black board marked “JM ELECTRONIC STM32F10XC8 SYSTEM BOARD”. It came complete with…
A busy Week
It has been a busy week here in the cave and as well as reviewing the likes of the new Sonoff TH16 units I’ve been doing various improvements – not to mention getting to grips with the VT100 terminal commands, squeezing the best from the somewhat dwindling Spanish heatwave and…
Sonoff TH10 and TH16
You will have seen me write about the excellent Sonoff ESP8266-controlled mains relay switching devices in the past and I went into great detail as to how to program them using the HC2016 software, the only caveat being they don’t have enough FLASH memory for OTA (well, not with my…
VT100 Terminal for HC2018
Well, I had to give it a go, didn’t I – porting the code for the cheap VT100-type serial terminal into the main ESP8266 home control software. BOY was that difficult but… after 2 days of head-scratching – check out the home control manual in the source code repository for…
Cheap Serial Terminal
How about a cheap serial terminal for less than a fiver all-in? In a previous blog entry I’ve been working on more developments for the increasingly powerful home control system using an Arduino as a kind of universal I2c peripheral to the ESP8266. The reason for that is just the…
Arduino 16 bit PWM Revelation
Here is a piece of code I found – quite old now. As most Arduino users will know, the PWM on the 328 chip is a bit… naff at only 8 bits. When attached to LEDS, at the low end, each step is painfully obvious – even value 1 is…
Espressif Save to FLASH–an alternative
In this article I’ll talk about making use of FLASH to store information in the ESP8266 wireless units (I refer here to those with 4Meg or more of FLASH – on the assumption that only the first 2 meg is in use plus a tiny bit at the end)… To clarify…
ADS1115 I2C A/D Convertor
Coming up next on HC2016 project – the ADS1115 I2C 4-channel A/D convertor. This item came from AliExpress – a very nice purple board – very clean – and importantly – very cheap at £1.89. I started off looking at some Adafruit code for a similar chip and immediately spotted…