This week I received a set of Sonoff units from Itead including the 4CHR3 and 4CHPROR3 (described as 4-gang Interlock/Self-locking/Inching WiFi DIY Light Switches) as well as a ZBMINI. I’ll cover that last item elsewhere as it is a small, Alexa/Google-compatible single-channel 10A power controller using Zigbee protocol. As for…
Category: General
General Itead Sonoff ramblings – now with Zigbee
Sonoff Zigbee Bridge Early in June 2020 I received my long-awaited along with Itead‘s pre-programmed Zigbee CC2531 USB dongle which means I have written about low-power-consumption Zigbee devices including Itead devices (also some from ZemiSmart). In this update I’m including the new Sonoff sensors, the ZBMINI which is a Zigbee…
INUX3D TerraPi Dual SSD Assembly
This TerraPi Dual SSD “case” or “assembly” for the Raspberry Pi 4 is different, to say the least. Available in red, black or blue, this vertical case is also available in single and dual SSD versions. I can best describe this beast in pictures – so I will. I just…
UUGear RasPiKey eMMC module for RPi4
Arrived this week and now checked out – The UUGear RasPiKey. While a far cry from an SSD speed-wise, the RasPiKey seems like a nice alternative to an SD when running a Raspberry Pi 4 or similar because RasPiKey uses eMMC, which, while more expensive than SD, gererally has an…
LAOTIE N7S 3-Mode Foldable Electric Scooter
I’ll grant you the is a little out of the ordinary for this blog – but when Banggood asked what I thought about the idea, I simply could not help myself as I’ve never owned an electric bike/scooter of ANY kind before, despite driving cars for around half a century…
EDUP MESH WiFi Routers
I have a couple of rectangular in my office on test… Easy to use and with English instructions, the first of these neat, inexpensive 12v-powered routers hooked into my network immediately, providing WiFi connectivity immediately as well as high speed Ethernet output. These devices are meant to be easy to…
Tasmota – TDM, Tasmotize and TasUI
This is a never-ending story about Theo Arends’s much-loved alternative firmware for IOT (http://ota.tasmota.com/tasmota/tasmota.bin.gz) as Tasmota is now at stable release version 8.5.1 “Hannah” (update October 2, 2020) and development version 9.0.0.1 – I’ve upgraded my various ESP8266-based devices including Itead Sonoff BASIC, TH10, 4CH Pro, ProR2, Powr2, Shelly One,…
PiSugar 2 and PiSugar 2 Pro
I’m now the proud owner of both the PiSugar 2 and PiSugar 2 Pro These are un-interruptible power supplies for the Raspberry Pi Zero and Raspberry Pi (3A, 3B, 3B+, 4B. Both of these boards come complete with magnetically attached Lithium battery – 1200maH capacity in the case of the…
Carku 64B versus D28A Portable Car Jump Starters
I have a couple of cars, one of which has a battery in doubtful state afet being flattened a few weeks ago. It works perfectly but knowing car batteries and their ability to recover from being flattened (or not) I at first figured I’d buy a battery charger – and…
Mikato S2 Smart PIR Toothbrush Sterilizer
It seems like an age ago that I wrote about the Soocas X3 Electric Toothbrushes.. and yet in fact it was just a couple of weeks ago – and now THIS – the (to give it the full title). I was and am impressed with the ultrasonic toothbrushes but even…
Laser Engraver Coming Up
I’m currently awaiting delivery of my new laser engraver but in the meantime, down at San Jose (the original one in Spain) on our weekend off, I just picked up this wonderful USB desk light – I could not resist showing it to you guys – as it occurred to…
GL-iNET Brume-W Travel Router
I’m currently playing with the Brume-W (GL-MV1000W) “Edge Computing Gateway”. To test, I turned on the virgin Brume – and connected the WAN to my network via a handy network lead. That’s it – nothing else – not a single extra step. I then pointed my phone to a new…
Lilygo TTGO ESP32 T-Watch-2020
OK, that’s a mouthful… The is particularly interesting to us technical folk as it runs on an ESP32 processor. I’ve been after one of these for ages for those tech moments – i.e. for the few times I get to go drinking with other technically minded folk who don’t want…
False Review Epidemic
You HAVE to see this. Blackview company just sent me emails promoting their new products – they wanted me (and others) to follow their official store – so being me, I sent back an email to suggest that if they wanted to ship one to me, I’d have a play…
Eachine E520S GPS WIFI Quadcoptor
I started this blog entry to tell you a little about the nice-looking which I received from Banggood Back in June (but read on) – I’ve added some VERY short videos further down – and I have an upgrade. My original Eachine drone was a basic model with 1080P camera…
SOOCAS X3 Electric Sonic Toothbrush
A good start to the week, I think. Today our new “smart” arrived in the mail and very nicely packed they were. This interesting sonic toothbrush (with APP) looks well made – and after the boring colours of my regular old non-sonic Braun electric, provides a refreshing change. The toothbrush…
Honorable Mention Weekend
Lots of things going on this weekend, nothing completed sufficiently to blog about in isolation but I felt the need to keep subscribers up to date and thank some people in the process. I’ve been trying to brighten up the blog a little – and CSS was never my strongest…
KSGER T12 Soldering Station
A quick writeup about the courtesy of Banggood – the unit comes minus mains power cable and with a single all-in-one tip – but looks very sturdy. So above I’ve shown what you get with the package, below I’ll show the unit assembled (takes seconds) and running – I put…
GL-iNet Spitz 4G LTE Smart Router
I’m impressed already – as a long-term occasional user of the GL-iNet Mango travel router, I thought I’d give their upmarket products a look – there is a lot more to this router than it first seems. The Spitz (GL-X750) is LOVELY. Check pricing in your area. Tiny and open-source,…
Blitzwolf BW-UP2 USB 3.2 Flash Drive
This morning in the post, arrived a . As a first simple write test, I copied one of my videos from my PC D: drive to the BW-UP2 – ok, not very scientific – but the copy time took exactly 8 seconds for a file of 925.2MBytes. And then, something…