This started off as a simple discussion on UPS for the likes of the Raspberry Pi and other micro boards but developed into so much more. Some great conversation, some ideas – and a project at the end which could fit a lot of requirements at very low cost. Read…
Month: October 2017
PI BB RPS
PI-BB-RPS – well didn’t I look at this offering from Alchemy Power Inc a while ago and discarded it because I thought it was just a breadboard for the Raspberry Pi !!! Wrong, it is more than that. Anyway, the designer sent me one of these all the way from…
4D Systems Gen4 IOD
My wife’s Chumby is on it’s last legs – and was about to go in the bin until along came a fortunate coincidence to save the day. Some time ago, 4D Systems sent me one of their LCD touch-screens. As many of you know I’m interested in the range of…
YAT and ESP8266
For some years now I’ve been using my own serial terminal for ESP8266 development – not any more! As fervent readers will know, over a period of time I’ve developed software for the phenomenally useful ESP8266 and you can find out more about that, here, suffice it to say it…
More Alexa Marvels
Some of you may recall that in the dim and distant past, Aidan and I wrote a SKILL for Amazon’s Alexa – which let us do anything by simply passing the speech back to Node-Red… and we could sent text as speech to Alexa. Well, that relied on SSL port…
ESP8266 Lies and Deceit
It never ceases to amaze me when looking through Ebay, the level to which companies or individuals are prepared try to mislead the public or at best are simply unable to form sentences correctly. Some even tell outright lies. Let’s take one of my favourite subjects, the ESP8266 boards. Way…
Enter the SHT30
The SHT30 is a chip able to measure temperature and humidity and it is very tiny. It is available on a “shield” board for as little as £1.76 including shipping – and will work with any system able to handle I2c – such as my own ESP8266 kitchen-sink code. Now,…
The Script and RPI 3 Update
Having started putting together “the script” a long time ago, long before the Raspberry Pi 3 came out – and having developed it to handle a wide range of boards and scenarios including of course the Pi3, I found it interesting to return today to installing “the script” on the…
MQTT Broker on an ESP8266
This is kind of interesting – the promise of an ESP8266 MQTT broker (not client – BROKER) able to talk to up to 25 connections. Really? Let’s find out. Go here to get an account (free) and download the .BIN file for your ESP8266. Use something like the NODEMCU flasher…
INA219 IC2 Added to ESP8266 code
Just a minor addition to my ESP8266 code – the INA219. Set to 32 volts, 2 amps by default, this i2c addition works with the cheap 0x40 addressed boards – I found them as low as under £2 – these little wonders can measure high side voltage and current !…
ESP8266 DIO mysteries SOLVED
So – ESP8266 – it turns out that some of the newer WEMOS boards require DIO mode for programming the FLASH chips – they just either will not program or will appear to but then not run if you use QIO programming mode (a flag used when flashing). At long…
A Tad more SSD1306
Just a short update – in my ESP8266 code I have a driver for the SSD1306 – and one of our readers had difficulty with this some time ago. Today I read the manual. Ooh, err. It turns out I’d put the wrong command in place – it worked if…