Progress

I thought I’d pen a general line as I’ve been quiet the past few days. Depressing news about France! We’re back in the UK after our summer in the sun – and nothing works – we’ve replaced the fridge, the microwave, you name it. I have managed to get some tech running, my test Raspberry Pi with Nextion display is up and running and checking the temperature downstairs – which is markedly different to what the room thermostat says – a difference I can only put down to the thermostat being on the same wall as the heating system.

As I left Spain, the WIFI issues were pretty much a thing of the past and one tiny issue I had with my Draytek router, inability to setup local DNS, was resolved this week by a kind technician at Draytek who kindly remoted into the router and brought it bang up to date – well beyond the updates I could find on the website and had I known this would be successful I would have bought another 2830 router from them for the UK. Rather handy to be able to access ESP devices by name internally. All of this is moot as the power went off over there yesterday and I’ve someone looking in on Monday to reset the fuse (some folk have all the luck, don’t they).

Time I would have normally spent on development has been spent getting TVs etc to work. Still some way to go but I want to fairly quickly get internal and external ESP temperature and humidity sensing up and running so that at least I can start graphing heat loss in the place. We use electric heat here so making the best use of heating is a priority for the winter.

No new news on Orange PI – no new versions of Debian for it that I’m aware of. No new news on Espressif’s latest product, I hope to have something new.  I’ve a PHOTON on the way to play with, Kamil Baczkowicz has confirmed that there’s a minor issue between the current Java and MQTT-SPY – older Java versions work fine and a new one will be out in January. I have MQTT.fx working but right now it has a long way to go to compete with MQTT-SPY – worth a look though.

Guy Molinari has sent me a sample of his ESP-12 LCD board which uses that little 160*240 colour LCD display I referred to in an earlier post. I’ll write something up when I actually have a desk with a soldering iron on it (workshop has yet to be built in our new home and it needs a concrete base first – all of which will take time).

Finally an “ESPresso Lite” is on it’s way to me to have a play with – more on that in a couple of weeks or so.

Update 26/11/2015: Kamil has just confirmed a workaround fixing this minor issue in the otherwise excellent MQTT-SPY – 0.1.3 beta build 24 works a TREAT. Still my favourite MQTT client test tool. https://github.com/kamilfb/mqtt-spy/wiki/Downloads – and I finally updated my last PC to Windows 10. Ahhhhh….