Lots of things going on this weekend, nothing completed sufficiently to blog about in isolation but I felt the need to keep subscribers up to date and thank some people in the process.
I’ve been trying to brighten up the blog a little – and CSS was never my strongest point – so I’d like to take the opportunity to thank Cindy Kendrick of CodeBrainMedia LLC (who’s website is being redone so no link) for useful help this morning when I started stumbling with their WordPress “Widget CSS Classes” plug-in.
She pointed me in the right direction and now I can meddle with the styling of the blog to my heart’s content. I’ve no doubt for every person who likes the side-panel changes there will be someone else who hates it… but there you go.
Meanwhile, As many of you know, I’ve experimented with all SORTS of ESP8266-based IOT boards over the years – nearly all of them from the far-east. So when Sylwester Bala of “ThingsOnEdge” contacted me to introduce their IOT product “IOT Cricket” – I was pleasantly surprised to find the company is based in the UK. Now, at THIS point I’m not saying if the product is any good or not, that will have to wait a few days until product samples arrive so I can have a play with them, at which point if all goes well I’ll point you to their links and technical docs and describe my experiences with the product – but I have, meantime, had a useful exchange of emails with Sylwester and Piotr Lewandowski and I’m pleased to say that IOT Cricket looks like a new ESP8266-based IOT product which is designed to work for long periods with or without cloud use on just a couple of AAA batteries (far longer than pretty much every board I’m using right now). More on this when the kit arrives.
I’ve ALSO been struggling with copious numbers of fraudulent blog attacks which use up resources and slow down the blog for you guys) and I’d like to thank tech support at Krystal Hosting for helping me out there. For now at least the problems are history.
I recently received a 256GB USB drive from Banggood – only to discover that my phone doesn’t want to know about EX-FAT. Until today I was under the impression that there were issues formatting such a large drive in FAT32 – certainly Windows 10 wasn’t having it – that is until Antonio (Mr Shark) in here pointed me to a useful utility called GuiFormat.Exe for Windows that immediately FAT32 formats such drives – no problem. Formatted, tested and working. There is still a per-file size limit but that should not generally be an issue in this case.
Finally some of you may recall my first, bumbling attempts at using an Eachine drone – which ended up with it disappearing down a deep crevace from which it never returned. Banggood shipped a replacement – a delivery from China which the bungling local courier here in Spain managed to screw up, resulting in the package being returned to sender. I am overjoyed to mention here that Banggood can now ship this from Europe and are giving it another go – so among the other items I expect to cover in the next week or two, I hope to be back outdoors armed with my phone and (this time 4K camera-equipped) drone while the weather is still warm. I’ll update the Eachine blog entry when the replacement drone arrives and I get it out into the hills – this time steering well clear of deep holes.