Not a company I’ve ever associated with home control, Blitzwolf do some decent battery packs – but now they have a neat little IOT mains relay controller of their own. So, first off the bat, another of their battery packs – the BW-P9 – this one has type C and…
Category: General
Besiter 20,000maH Power Pack
This on’e a little more beefy than previous power packs I’ve recently looked at (I did sayI had a backlog). The Besiter 20000mAh QC3.0 Quick Charge Dual USB LED Display Power Bank is a solid-looking and only JUST pocket-sized battery pack able to handle type-C, micro-usb and full USB-S connections…
A95X Android 9 TV Box
Ok, that’s done. I am more grateful than you might imagine for a speedy delivery from China – Banggood sent me the latest A95X TV box which is around £37 inc post right now. But perhaps the main reason I’m grateful is we just arrived back in the UK from…
Uninterruptible Power Field Day
I’ve been messing with uninterruptible power supply issues for years and with Raspberry Pi and similar needing (only at leak of course) 3A 5v power, I’ve looked at various alternatives. Here’s a thought for motorists who are IOT enthusiasts as well.. I just solved the issue of the Raspberry Pi…
Sonoff Mini with Espurna versus the competition
You can’t get away from it, the iTead products are cheap – and sometimes that is very important. But are they the best solution for Home Control? Well, that depends. Sonoff products have always been inexpensive. But bear with me. At one time the company had a seemingly unbeatable grip…
Solar Wireless Car TPMS Monitor
This device – advertised as a Car Solar Wireless TPMS Tyre Tyre Pressure Monitor has turned out to be wonderful. See the photo of the device sitting on my car dash (2 brackets and an adhesive pad supplied – I used the latter) which also comes complete with manual and…
Bakeey Glass for Pocophone F1
IMHO the most important thing next to having a sparkly SmartPhone is to have sparkly screen protectors to keep the phone looking new. If you follow the blog you’ll know I’m particularly proud of my Pocophone F1 and want to keep it in the best possible condition. To that end…
Node Red 1.01 is OUT
Not only is there a new release of Node-Red i.e. 1.01 – I also noted there is some new video material to go with it. Congratulations to Nick O’Leary, Dave Conway Jones and others. If you’re interested, I suggest a look here… Much more later when I figure out how…
Rechargeable Desk Cooling Fan with Light
To give this lovely fan its proper title… Wireless 3000mAh 2 In 1 Mini Cooling Fan Or: I love it: “Little Sunny Baldness Fan”. And here’s the fan itself… Smashing job, 3 speeds and a white light inside. Lowest speed almost silent, overall quiet and it has no visible blades,…
DIRT Cheap Sonoffs
If you are into home control, then unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve almost certainly heard of Sonoff – Sonoff BASIC is their cheap power controller… recently upgraded to R3. Well, until October 31, Banggood have a VERY special price on the R2. I’ve been using these for…
Node-Red 1.0 b3 Trials
This one is only for Raspberry Pi / Node-Red fans. ALL SORTED – everything works – so this is here merely to help others and maybe to encourage a better setup for I2C, RPI GPIO in Node-Red 1.0 official, serial and SQLITE3? Here’s a thing – don’t even THINK about…
RPI4 Network Lesson
This blog entry was last updated mid-September 2019 and covers a wide range of issues I’ve had and resolved since the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer (SBC) and the “Buster” update to the (Linux Debian-based) Raspbian operating system, in particular in setting up the networking and hostname…