If you read the blog about the Maker Faire, I just came back with a bag of goodies and one of them is a microwave movement sensor. Not the two-board solution I discussed a while ago that never really worked – this is a small, neat single board called an…
Category: ESP8266
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…
Weather 2 Board and ESP8266
NOT the cheapest board on the planet, I was handed a couple of these little boards by a friend this weekend.. the weather-2 board. The board uses 2 i2c chips – the BME280 which as you may know is a miraculous little chip offering temperature, humidity and pressure readings all…
Dazzling LED ESP8266
So… the other day, a parcel turned up for me – some samples from Itead. One of the boxes contained 4 strips of LEDS and a controller. The strips are maybe 20mm wide aluminium with staggered SMT LEDs on them – first a warm LED, then a COLD LED then..…
I2C Expansion for Pi and ESP8266
Want 64 GPIO pins on your ESP8266 or Raspberry Pi? Read on. If like me you are not THAT familiar with I2c, you might find the results of my experiments interesting and perhaps even useful. If like me you are not THAT familiar with I2c, you might find the results…
POW, TH16 AND DUAL
Ok, this entry will be in 2 parts – I’ll do some digging soon – but as I’ve had several requests for this… So what you’re looking at above are the Sonoff Pow, TH16 and DUAL mains controllers. These are ESP8266-based low cost controllers to turn things on and off.…
The Light Fantastic
This morning, a long-forgotten package turned up for me – a cheap but accurate light level sensor from China – claimed to be around 1 lux accuracy and giving a direct output in lux. A small board is available here in Britain for around £4 or the identical board from…
Node Red Sunday
It is Sunday, I’ve done my 4,000 steps down to the village for coffee and back and I’m having a play. I use Node-Red on a Raspberry Pi to control just about everything in two houses – as my confidence in the setup has grown, I’m currently keeping the Pi…
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…
ADS1115 I2C A/D Convertor
Coming up next on HC2016 project – the ADS1115 I2C 4-channel A/D convertor. This item came from AliExpress – a very nice purple board – very clean – and importantly – very cheap at £1.89. I started off looking at some Adafruit code for a similar chip and immediately spotted…
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…
16 Channels of PWM for ESP8266
This morning a little board turned up for me – the advert said “Smart Electronics” – but the board says Adafruit 16-channel 12-bit PWM board. At £1.38 each these represent EXCELLENT value – especially as the Adafruit originals are much more expensive. Nicely made with gold connections and all the…
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…
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…
Sunday Morning Experimenting
I figured after a couple of horrendous days figuring out what was wrong with my ROMS, it was time for a morning’s relaxing. Some time ago I added I2c to the Home Control software but never actually got around to doing anything with it. The i2c parallel expansion modules I…
A Good Gadget Day
Today has been a good day. After a great Saturday down at Castril (waterfalls etc – fantastic weather) in Southern Spain, Aidan Ruff and I sat down with some wine to test his new movement sensor/smoke detector board. As is often the case, the first iteration has some issues but…
Home Control Updates
For those following the home control project including the ROMS for ESP8266, I’ve made several changes in the last few days including a new uptime command {uptime?} returning a string of the time since last reset/power-cycle. Also added that to the debug output – also fixed a couple of minor…
ESP8266 and Nextion Updates
This one will be on-going.. so the plan was to write a blog about the latest version of our little ESP-12 board and it working with the new Nextion display board. But as happens in life from time to time, it all went wrong at the Nextion end. However… Our…