It’s been a good day today.
Let me clarify that – a good day considering I’m in the Northeast of England, wishing I was in the south of Spain and currently freezing to death.
I got up far too early with ideas in my head about the Thermostat – to cut a long story short, I had some ideas about introducing status colours into the top part of the display to show when the stat is off automatic or in away mode – that went fabulously well as you can see on the right – the status colours show up if you go off automatic – making it much more obvious. Preliminary Node-Red flow here – see previous blog about requirements. I have now updated the original Thermostat blog entry here.
In the meantime I had an email back from the fellow who wrote the CANVAS dial, I’d used the JavaScript control because I simply did not understand how to interact with the canvas inside a Node-Red Dashboard template. Suffice it to say I do now and I’ve some more upgrades in the background. Exciting stuff and opens up a world of opportunities.
Incidentally – once again, yesterday set a record for views on the blog – so thanks to all the new readers in here – I trust you’re finding this interesting.
Meanwhile a boatload of post turned up for me including a mountain of ONION2 peripherals which I’ll blog as soon as I get a minute – and the new FriendlyArm A64 board. I’ve been working with Antonio (MrShark) on this on and off as the operating system that came with it was ancient. A long conversation for another time, suffice it to say that right now we have Xenial and my script running on it but a few mods are going to be needed to accommodate this powerful 64-bit SBC.
I ALSO got some tiny DC/DC convertors I’ve been waiting for. I’d originally planned to make up a 24 volt solar system for Spain and of course all my stuff runs on 5v or 12v – slightly less of a worry now I’m going down the 12v route (I have a very nice 12v 500w full sine wave invertor sitting in front of me) but these boards are CUTE – size of my thumb-end and take up to 30v in with variable output. Cheap, too. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/20-pcs-Ultra-Small-Size-DC-DC-Step-Down-Power-Supply-Module-3A-Adjustable-Step-Down/32262311443.html?spm=2114.13010608.0.0.4iRhaN
Now, they CLAIM 3amps, I don’t believe it but they were so cheap if they do 2amps I’ll be happy – however it just so happens I have a 1R resistor – so, I may just test one to destruction – the worst that can happen is a smell of burning plastic on test. Just before giving up for the night – I set the output to 3v, input 30v supply and banged a 1r 10w resistor on the output – which rose slightly to 3.2v (hence 3.2 amps) and within 20 second the resistor was quite warm and the pcb I would say hot… but no very hot. I could see 2 amps coming out, yes….
As always some great comments in the various blog areas – I need a system to star rate comments and make them available in a “most useful” list order… a lot of great info from some great people hidden away.
That and some really pretty microUSB THICK leads from Ebay and home-made soup for lunch, not a bad day at all. More tomorrow –I have high hopes for the FriendlyArm board – and it is cheap, too!