Some time ago, I wrote about the FriendlyArm NanoPi M1, a simple, low cost board which seems to hold it’s own against the Raspberry Pi2 in all but GPIO control – that’s not to say there is anything wrong with the GPIO but you have to write your own stuff…
Month: November 2016
A Little Dashboard Something
Something for the weekend sir? How about a simple means to get visual and tactile feedback from node-red-dashboard buttons? Or rather than large buttons – icons you may create or obtain yourself in a node-red-dashboard template. To backtrack: For my own home control endeavours, I’ve been using a number of…
Dazzling LED ESP8266
So… the other day, a parcel turned up for me – some samples from Itead. One of the boxes contained 4 strips of LEDS and a controller. The strips are maybe 20mm wide aluminium with staggered SMT LEDs on them – first a warm LED, then a COLD LED then..…
Amazon and the UK
I thought you might like to see a communication with Amazon and my responses.. I am pretty annoyed as it is not the first time an American company has launch stuff around the world – keen to get sales going but not so keen to provide international customers with the…
New This Weekend
Over the weekend I have added a new MENU item to the blog – COMMENTS – thanks to MrShark for that idea. Menu top right. The page shows the last 100 comments which will hopefully be useful. I’ve also added an experimental e-newsletter (again on request, several people said they’d…
How Not To Do PCBs
My usual stance is to be nice to Itead, I’ve been dealing with them for some time and although I have absolutely no commercial or personal tie up with them, they do send product samples from time to time as do many others – and I usually end up writing…
Size Matters… Neo AIR
When it comes to size, this one is as good as any… the FriendlyArm Nano Pi Neo Air. You’ve probably read my blog about the Nano Pi Neo, a device I can only describe as “cute” because of it’s really small size – but powerful non-the-less. Well, the AIR version…
I2C Expansion for Pi and ESP8266
Want 64 GPIO pins on your ESP8266 or Raspberry Pi? Read on. If like me you are not THAT familiar with I2c, you might find the results of my experiments interesting and perhaps even useful. If like me you are not THAT familiar with I2c, you might find the results…
Toying with HA-BRIDGE
Thanks to readers in here I’m having a play with HA-Bridge to act as a device gateway between my home control (generally ESP8266) devices and Amazon Echo. I’m only scratching the surface and haven’t gotten past “Alexa, turn X on”, “Alexa turn X off” and “Alexa set X to 30%” …
Netdata
This is NEAT – reader Jay brought this to my attention this afternoon – here’s the link. So Netdata is a system monitoring tool – but better than any I’ve seen up to now – certainly on the Raspberry Pi – so I simply followed the instructions in that link,…
POW, TH16 AND DUAL
Ok, this entry will be in 2 parts – I’ll do some digging soon – but as I’ve had several requests for this… So what you’re looking at above are the Sonoff Pow, TH16 and DUAL mains controllers. These are ESP8266-based low cost controllers to turn things on and off.…
The Light Fantastic
This morning, a long-forgotten package turned up for me – a cheap but accurate light level sensor from China – claimed to be around 1 lux accuracy and giving a direct output in lux. A small board is available here in Britain for around £4 or the identical board from…