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Month: May 2018

30V 10A Bench Supply Wanptek

May 30, 2018May 31, 2018 Peter ScargillWanptek4 Comments on 30V 10A Bench Supply Wanptek

Today I received a rather lovely power supply from Tomtop. I have a number of bench supplies but nothing with this kind of power… Nicely packed and complete with UK power adaptor. There was additional packing around this box.

Bluetooth Speaker Giveaway

May 29, 2018June 10, 2018 Peter ScargillGeneral2 Comments on Bluetooth Speaker Giveaway

Uptated June 10, 2018. You will have seen my blog entry recently about goodies from Inateck including their The BP1109 Bluetooth speaker which I’m now using a lot… it is lovely. Well, they wanted another bite at the cherry so to be in with a chance to win one of…

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Plant watering Fiasco

May 28, 2018June 17, 2018 Peter ScargillGarden sensors35 Comments on Plant watering Fiasco

As more technical people wake up to the folly of trying to use simple resistive DC plant moisture sensors, it seems the Chinese have latched onto the idea of capacitive sensing… And here it is, the sensor that is all over Ebay right now at am amazingly low £2 inc…

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Keyboard KBO2001 from Inateck

May 24, 2018May 28, 2018 Peter ScargillInateck, Inateck keypad2 Comments on Keyboard KBO2001 from Inateck

And here it is, another package from Inateck, this time their KBO2001 Bluetooth numeric keypad – and very nice it is, too. Again the multi-language manual. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07C1TSTYV

Big Timer Status

May 22, 2018May 23, 2018 Peter ScargillGeneral10 Comments on Big Timer Status

I occasionally get comments in the blog about people having problems with BigTimer, virtually all get resolved by users themselves and it is quite some time since BigTimer has actually had any problems, so for clarification, here it is working alongside Blynk, inject nodes and with MQTT. I am currently…

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Goodies from Inateck

May 21, 2018May 29, 2018 Peter ScargillInateck18 Comments on Goodies from Inateck

In today’s postbag came three items from Inateck, namely a lovely small, well packaged Bluetooth plus aux input, a USB powered Bluetooth loudspeaker, completed with leads. The unit also supports a microSD card. Also in the post from the same company, a tiny Bluetooth receiver/transmitter and a quality dual-phone mains…

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Deceitful Advertising

May 19, 2018 Peter ScargillGeneral7 Comments on Deceitful Advertising

Sometimes I wonder what has happened to trading standards in the Internet age. Today it is apparently perfectly ok to lie through your teeth when advertising, particularly when you can later hide behind the language barrier. See particularly bollocks advert here at AliExpress. They don’t do themselves or  us any…

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OLED just a quick one

May 17, 2018 Peter ScargillGeneral8 Comments on OLED just a quick one

Blog reader Ian Sexton has some boards going cheap for people who want ESP8266 based OLED. http://myiot.co.uk/ESP_OLED/ – I’ll leave it up to Ian to comment further.

The New FriendlyARM K1 PLUS Board

May 15, 2018August 26, 2018 Peter ScargillFriendlyArm, K1 PLUS31 Comments on The New FriendlyARM K1 PLUS Board

In today’s postbag, a pair of the new NanoPi K1 PLUS boards from FriendlyARM. These powerful H5-based boards look interesting and in this case came complete with heatsinks, Pi-size transparent case and handy FTDIs for programming.

FY6800 Signal Generator

May 15, 2018May 15, 2018 Peter ScargillFeeltech FY680035 Comments on FY6800 Signal Generator

In today’s postbag, the new Feeltech FY6800 dual channel Signal Generator, complete with UK power lead, two bnc test leads, USB lead and bnc-bnc lead. However the unit came with no instructions or other paperwork. I assume a manual will follow later. The unit arrived well-packed via FedEx. Lovely to…

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More Home Control 2020

May 14, 2018February 2, 2020 Peter Scargillhome control23 Comments on More Home Control 2020

As of version 1.5.61 (now on 2.3.18 or higher) of the Home Control 2020 code,  I’ve  expanded the {debug} command considerably, added new Hitachi display commands and introduced a new MQTT topic called “otacomplete”. Here is the Bitbucket repository for the ESP8266 project, referred to also as ESP-GO. The Hitachi…

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The Nano Peripheral Update

May 13, 2018May 13, 2018 Peter ScargillGeneral29 Comments on The Nano Peripheral Update

I mentioned recently in an entry aimed at beginners, that I’ve been installing “the script” and my ESP8266 code on various devices. I now have a backed-up Raspberry Pi 3B+ board set up for testing, with the latest Raspbian and fully up to date Node-Red nodes including my own and…

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Arduino Peripheral for HC2019

May 11, 2018August 7, 2019 Peter ScargillESP12, ESP12E, ESP12F, ESP8266, Hackitt & Bodgitt64 Comments on Arduino Peripheral for HC2019

As many of you know, I don’t have a great deal of time for Arduino for WIFI/Ethernet – I cannot tell you how many months I wasted on those daft cheap Ethernet boards for them which never really worked reliably no matter what I did – so I probably have…

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HC 2018 Experiments

May 11, 2018May 20, 2018 Peter ScargillArduino, ATMEGA328, ESP12, ESP12E, ESP12F, ESP8266, Espressif, home control6 Comments on HC 2018 Experiments

Throughout the development of the Home Control 2018 project I’ve constantly had the software tied a via a serial umbilical to my PC to monitor passing messages, make sure all is well etc. and to periodically check on RAM space to make sure nothing I’m doing is running away with…

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Raspberry Pi Serial Port

May 11, 2018May 11, 2018 Peter ScargillRaspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi 2, Raspberry Pi 35 Comments on Raspberry Pi Serial Port

Over the past couple of years, I’ve installed operating systems on a number of little boards and I have to say, that while the Raspberry Pi with Raspbian is generally the easiest when it comes to enabling GPIO, the serial port can be a pain. Here is how to ease…

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MCH K305D Power Supply

May 10, 2018May 11, 2018 Peter ScargillGeneral6 Comments on MCH K305D Power Supply

I just received a neat little switch-mode power supply in the post from Banggood, the K305D. This neat supply runs up to 30 volts output (fully adjustable) and up to 5 amps (constant voltage or constant current)  with 0.01v resolution and 0.001a resolution on the blue LED displays.  The unit…

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The Spanish Project

May 4, 2018May 10, 2018 Peter ScargillBlynk, Internet of Things9 Comments on The Spanish Project

Over time, I’ve trialled many mobile user interfaces for my home control endeavours, from Blynk, through MQTT Dashboard (and variations), Imperihome and the Node-Red dashboard (not to mention its predecessor Node-Red-Contrib-UI). For a while I settled on Imperihome but they were dead set on focussing on supporting every device known…

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As I have no idea of your level of technical skill or the requirements of your country laws in terms of electricity supply etc, I accept no responsibility for any damage attributed to following advice in these pages.

When dealing with wall outlet (high) voltages you should satisfy yourself that whatever you are doing is safe and if unsure, seek advice from someone who is sure.

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