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…
Category: ESP8266
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…
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…
Remote checking Home Control Units
Those of you who are aware of the Home Control project (Home Control 2019) will know that the software/hardware combination of a Raspberry Pi (running Jessie, Node-Red, SQLite and Mosquitto) and ESP12 (running the software described in the Home Control project) is proving very reliable – but there are occasions…
Home Control and Nextion Updates
Just a brief update. Thanks to some feedback I was prompted to see if it is possible in the home control project to get feedback as to the state of an output on the same line as controlling it. So for payloads you might use {out12:1} to turn on GPIO12…
Status update
It may seem like I’ve been quite the past week – but having arrived safely in Spain we’ve had lots to do. However I have done some updates to the “home control 2016” blog entry as I’ve implemented some fixes to the node-red-contrib-esplogin node. For those of you unfamiliar with…
North East Maker Faire 2016
I could not be there at the Maker Faire UK in the Centre for Life in Newcastle – but thanks to my spies – it’s great to see so many people there. Apparently this couple on the left are into ESP8266 and got some ideas from the blog. Glad you…
Simple Serial Terminal lost blog
For reasons beyond me the original article on my serial terminal, originally put together when I was messing with LUA, has disappeared from the blog entirely – and so here’s a quickly updated version but this is no longer developed as I use YAT which is GREAT.. So above right…
Flashing HC 2019 Code
This entry is now incorporated into the main Home Control blog entry. This is for the people who’ve been trying out my software (or thinking of trying it out) on the ridiculously cheap (£1.40) but very reliable, powerful and comprehensive ESP12 WIFI processor board and those who’ve gone ahead and…
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…
Itead Slampher and Sonoff
Remind you of IKEA? No? Heard of ESP8266? Yes? Well, Slampher and Sonoff are two products from Itead and I think you’ll like at least one of them. They arrived at my desk today. Slampher is a screwfit lamp fitting – take the E27 lamp out – put Slampher in…
Nextion and ESP8266
Ever since I fell in love with the little Nextion displays I’ve been thinking about a little ESP8266 board to go with them – well, I’ve been beaten to it. Today I received in the post a little box from Guy Molinari with his efforts – I have to say…
A successful Techy Day
So much going on today I thought I’d put the lot into one blog entry. So, I’ve spent the day with my pal playing with one of several IOT solutions – familiar to regular readers – node-red-contrib-ui. This just keeps getting better. So we spent our afternoon getting to grips…
Thermostat Christmas Wishes
Still ploughing away with the thermostat side of my home control. Having had working code for some time now using ESP8266 modules (and hopefully soon the odd ESP32 device) to control things with Node-Red on the Raspberry Pi acting as the central controller and in charge of mobile and serial…
ESP32 Arrival
And here it is – the ESP32 – or rather the ESP-32 development kit. Mine is in a batch that is running late so my pal has given me his to play with. I figured I’d take a pic in my hand so you can gauge size. This tiny box…
Smoke Alarm by Email
Reader Christian brought this to my attention.. (http://www.simpleiothings.com/10-diy-wifi-smoke-alarm-notifier-roost-nest-alternative-full-tutorial/) The guy uses a NodeMCU, a USB wall power supply and audio sensor (microphone) to catch the audible alarm and start a WiFi alert via IFTTT. The smoke alarm unit stays unaltered and you never have to think about running out of…
Some thoughts on Node Red variables
In learning how to use Node-Red I’ve changed my coding countless times as I’ve found better ways to do things. Please note that in 2017, the way I use global variables here is out of date. It still works but for example context.global.fred=1 is now written as global.set(“fred”,1). Read this…
EMW3265 ESP8266 KILLER
Erm, no, though you might think so by this headline.. https://hackaday.com/2015/07/13/new-part-day-the-esp8266-killer Read the comments – the $5 ESP8266 – where? $2 ESP8266 more like it – less, even – http://goo.gl/VB0V9K There’s even a claim that this new single-source board (Seeed Studio) has MORE memory – well at least one variation…