Many moons ago I just happened to be staying overnight with my pal Jonathan and he had some surplus (and so free) Byron 433Mhz wireless doorbell-pushes to demonstrate. He showed me a universal RF 433Mhz receiver board he purchased with which could look at the signals from the various kinds…
Category: ESP12
November Quickie – Stress – TDM and ESP-GO
A few simples notes on probably my pet project and also some work that Antonio and I have been doing recently including a quick stress test for the Pi4, for those concerned about heat… remember I wrote about a combined heatsink/case? With this: sudo apt-get install stresswhile true; do vcgencmd…
The Wall Display
This blog has been updated as I’ve discovered that these displays are, after all, still freely available from AliExpress. I’ve recently spent time working on my hallway wall display, an amount of time which would be considered commercial suicide. Good job it isn’t commercial. Of course I’ve not just been…
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…
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…
The Script and ESP8266 Code for Beginners
I’m often asked about setting up MQTT, Node-Red etc. on the likes of Raspberry Pi, NanoPi or similar, with a view to controlling ESP8266 devices. Novice readers start here Usually it is difficult for me to see this from a beginner perspective, but having spent 2 months in hospital thanks…
ESP8266 and ATMEGA2560 Mega Board
You may recall my blog entry about my “universal peripheral” – using the little Arduino Nano or similar clones with an ESP8266 – with the former providing GPIO via an I2c connection. Well, that led me to getting this little number from Banggood – the Wemos Atmega + WiFi R2…
The Script and RPI 3 Update
Having started putting together “the script” a long time ago, long before the Raspberry Pi 3 came out – and having developed it to handle a wide range of boards and scenarios including of course the Pi3, I found it interesting to return today to installing “the script” on the…
A Tad more SSD1306
Just a short update – in my ESP8266 code I have a driver for the SSD1306 – and one of our readers had difficulty with this some time ago. Today I read the manual. Ooh, err. It turns out I’d put the wrong command in place – it worked if…
Icons
In case you were wondering – no, I’ve not gone off the boil, I’ve been quietly beavering away on my ESP8266 code since deciding to abandon the old ESP-01 and adding fonts for displays. Right now I’m focussing on the QD-Tech boards – 120×160 but I’ll eventually migrate the use…
Grove LCD RGB Backlight
Now, before anyone says anything – no I’m not advertising Seeed or their Grove stuff. It just so happens that over the weekend my pal brought some of their stuff over to have a play with and I was particularly taken by the LCD display. This is a typical Hitachi-style…
VT100 Terminal for HC2018
Well, I had to give it a go, didn’t I – porting the code for the cheap VT100-type serial terminal into the main ESP8266 home control software. BOY was that difficult but… after 2 days of head-scratching – check out the home control manual in the source code repository for…
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…
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…
Nextion Update
As you may know the home control software can work with Nextion displays and there is a project on the blog on that subject – I note that one or two people are having issues here so rather than reply without pictures – here’s a general update. Currently with the…
Christmas at Bedrock
Well it certainly feels like Christmas here at Bedrock (while I’m here, check out this unrelated item – the Ameba – looks interesting). I got up this morning to a large bag of post – including a new battery for Maureen’s Samsung laptop (though why I mention that in the…
New PCB
After a slight hiccup with the new board (LED track missing) here’s the new board – link for PCB here – as you can see, Aidan has made several improvements – smaller buttons, connector for DHT22 etc, markings for I2c (right now I only have support for the 8-output expander…
BMP280 for HC 2018
I have just added a working BMP280 implementation into the Home Control 2018 code (see right menu in blog) returning temperature and pressure. Add that to the (already implemented) BME280 code, Seeed display, 16,channel PWM, port expansion and more, it’s not been a bad development week really! Manual updated. The…
ESP12 and Memory
Anyone writing large projects with the ESP units in C (and probably in other languages without necessarily realising it) will have come across the problems of .TEXT memory. This is the RAM used to store functions. Functions are stored in their own part of RAM called .TEXT memory and it…