Introduction (Latest update February 01, 2020) Minor update here – I’ve gone back to SDK 2.1 for now as RBOOT will just not reliably OTA on SDK 3.1 – and there is nothing wrong with SDK 2.1 Sick of reading about other people’s home control? Want to make your own?…
Category: Arduino
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…
Arduino Cores
Just a quick one…. for some time until I discovered the ESP8266 and the Espressif SDK which I use today, I was an Arduino fan and one of the more annoying aspects was the lack of support for all but the mainstream units – Atmega328, 2560 etc. One particularly nice…
What a Week
What a week this has been. Firstly apologies to everyone seeing 404 errors yesterday. It turns out it was an issue with settings on the LightSpeed servers the provider is using… I’ve had no end of issues with them… but hopefully this is now resolved. Meanwhile I’ve been doing a…
Cheap Serial Terminal
How about a cheap serial terminal for less than a fiver all-in? In a previous blog entry I’ve been working on more developments for the increasingly powerful home control system using an Arduino as a kind of universal I2c peripheral to the ESP8266. The reason for that is just the…
Faster ESP I2C
Experimenting with I2c on the ESP8266? I am – and I’m having a great time with it. If you’re using my code you don’t really need to think about it but if you’re hunting around for better I2c for the ESP – or maybe interfacing the ESP8266 to Arduino –…
I2C the Easy Way
If you’re going to experiment with I2C – may as well do it the easy way. Having spent the past few days with a desk that looks remarkably like a bowl of spaghetti, I’ve finally gotten around to making a special IOTBEAR board up for the job. 18 each of…
Arduino Libraries and ESP8266
So I’m working on a side project – which may or may not go anywhere – to make a working version of my home control 2016 ESP8266 software in the Arduino environment. One popular device is the Dallas DS18b20 temperature sensor, a simple 3 wire device that looks like a…
I2C Continuum
Updated August 07. 2016: This article which started off discussing the “new addition” of i2c to the home control software, is now NOT ONLY about an I2c 2/4 line LCD display facility recently added to the ESP8266 boards – but there’s a PARALLEL version as well, making use of GPIO…
ESP8266 Meets Arduino via I2C
If you’ve been reading the blog regularly you’ll know I added I2c to the ESP8266 code some time ago – that is, the ability to send an I2c message either to read or write – originally intended and still working with cheap I/O expanders – so you lose 2 wires…
ESP8266 Remote Access
Notice I titled that remote access as against remote programming – but that’s part of it. Years ago, having gotten sick and tired of dismantling my home control Arduinos just to upgrade the code, I purchased a couple of small units from China which I’ve just thrown in the bin. …
A GroveStreams Node Red Node
One of the more obvious things to do with a home control system is to capture information like temperature and humidity – and to graph it. For example I spent part of my time in the UK and part of it in Spain. When I’m not in Spain it is…
Notepad++ for Arduino
Anyone tried the Arduino Notepad plugin yet? Essentially lets you use Notepad++ to edit your Arduino files while in the Arduino environment – with syntax highlighting etc… looks like a good idea to me.
The Oak by DigiStump
One of our readers has rightly pointed me to this new Kickstarter project – The Oak by Digistump (http://digistump.com/oak/) which has a number of things going for it – potential approval, secure WIFI interfacing and programming and Arduino compatibility. Indeed it is hard to fault this device other than when…
In a Far Distance Galaxy
A long, long time ago in a far distant…well, world, when I was pretty much using Arduinos for everything, the ESP-01 came along and my friend and colleague Aidan made a little board to handle a relay, an LCD display and.. an ESP-01. At the time we had no use…
And now… SMING Framework
As if the LAST announcement about an Arduino development environment wasn’t good enough (if you read my blog I acknowledged that the Arduino IDE was not as good as Eclipse) – there’s an ECLIPSE Arduino environment called Sming Open Source Framework. They’ve not YEY gotten MQTT working apparently but there…
An ESP8266 for Arduino Game Changer?
(updated 2/4/2015) Here we go again – just as you thought it was safe to start coding, another game-changer comes along. This time not only do we have an Arduino IDE for the ESP8266 (which isn’t a stunningly good IDE but it’s awfully familiar to many developers) but also what…
FTDI Bricked Chips Fix
I odn’t know if I’ve been in a cave for the last few months – I certainly have for the last couple of weeks (literally), but when I came to program my little ESP8266 boards using the only trusty FTDI chip I have here in Spain (and as you can…