This entry is all about InfluxDB, Grafana and a cute little Bluetooth garden sensor! Some time ago a pal of mine and I did some swaps of spare kit and I ended up with a Mi Flora sensor. A rather pleasing looking device, the MI Flora has a 3v lithium…
Month: April 2017
NanoPi Neo 2
You may well have read my review of the NanoPi NEO back in August 2016 – a nice little H3 unit available in two versions, 256Meg and 512Meg RAM. Well, the new unit has an H5 64-bit processor and comes with 512MB RAM and although there is only one USB…
Amazon Polly Speech
Regular readers will know that I am an Ivona fan. In Node-Red I use the free Ivona service to provide high quality speech for my Raspberry Pi in Node-Red at the heart of my home control setup. Well, Ivona is now defunct. Amazon Polly is a replacement. I’ll clarify that,…
RTK.GPIO Board
I was recently given the opportunity thanks to a good friend, to check out the RTK.GPIO board, a small PCB with microUSB socket which promises to emulate the IO of a Raspberry Pi. The board, sure enough has a Raspberry Pi connector looking remarkably similar to the Pi with 3v3…
Summer Migration
As Maureen and I start our summer migration to southern Spain, don’t expect anything new in here until around 17th – but of course – people are commenting constantly on various blog entries so I do hope you’re registered so you won’t miss anything. I’m quiet excited, when we get…
ESP12S
I’m looking forward to trying out the new ESP12-S – this one apparently has a better antenna – and by the look of the schematic (see page 15 – thanks Alexander) the resistors on reset, GPI))0,2 and 15 are already there. That should simplify layout somewhat! ai-thinker.com – www.ai-thinker.com/uploadfile/2016/0909/20160909073755898.pdf Hmm,…
Espruino For You Sir
As a once-dedicated C programmer (I learned with the K&R book) I originally dismissed Javascript as an interpreted toy (great for websites of course), that is until I started playing with Node-Red. At that point, after much struggle, I started to get reasonably good with it and once I got…
File Share Quickies
Following on from an initial comment by Keith Howell in the blog about NGROK, Antonio and I were chatting today about TKaiser’s little testing script and I wanted to share something with him. Skype of course is useless at this unless it’s a very small file – but we’ve used…
A Question of Lifespan
Here we started a conversation about SD Lifespan. How can we make our SBC projects run for longer? In comments I’ve seen elsewhere, people seem to think it is OK that a Pi may well fail within a year due to SD – I don’t think that is even REMOTELY…
Raspberry Pi 3 Serial
Just bought a new Raspberry Pi 3 with WIFI and Bluetooth? Using it in a project with serial? Happy? Well, you might not be so happy when you find out what I just found out. I had my Node-Red project that has been controlling the house for around 18 months…
Microwave for the Weekend
If you read the blog about the Maker Faire, I just came back with a bag of goodies and one of them is a microwave movement sensor. Not the two-board solution I discussed a while ago that never really worked – this is a small, neat single board called an…
Newcastle Maker Faire
What a great day. Newcastle has an annual Maker Faire and it is on this weekend – and what a faire it is. I headed off first thing to get some parking and was pleased to find that Newcastle College had some cheap parking – £4 for the day. I…