I picked the HF03X from Gearbest because it seems to have all the right features in a smartwatch/smartband at a reasonable price. Colour, decent battery charge life, pulse, blood pressure, oxygen levels, sleep, sport, notifications, alarm etc. The last watch from GearBest was the Xiaomi Mi 3 – lovely, gets…
Category: General
BigTimer 2.06 update questions answered
I’ve been asked questions about output from my Node-Red-Contrib-BigTimer in the 2.06 update and also the new(ish) “timer X” option. Here is a working demo, I’ve added a timer to my desk with a Sonoff BASIC attached and a lamp to test. Output 1 is as you can see working…
T12 Digital Temperature Controlled Soldering Station
Another potential winner from Banggood, or rather would be, if I’d had my act together when ordering. The V2.1S T12 Digital Temperature Controlled Soldering Station is a small, neat soldering station complete with iron and combined bit/element – it looks good and well built. I would advise getting spare parts…
Early Christmas
I must say it does feel a little like Christmas already in the frozen wastes of the Northeast of England. Partly because it is bag-bitingly cold but also as the post came this morning with my new watch (the mother of all watches) which I’ll detail shortly – but first…
H96 Max Plus USB 3 TV Box
The H96 Max+ is, how can I put it, wonderful. It has Android 8.1, both WIFI and high speed Ethernet, 4k HD video (yes, I have a 4K TV) 32GB storage (4GB internal RAM), USB 3.0, HDMI output and more. At the time of writing, it is a very low…
New Toys in the USA
Currently we’re over in the USA for Thanksgiving which seems to be a curious mix of reasons to eat, drink and shop even more than usual. Add to the mix Black Friday and Cyber Monday and apart from the weather (it is truly cold in Chicago right now) this is…
HT-175 Infrared Thermal Imager
I’ve wanted one of these hand held imagers since I heard of the FLIR – but could never justify the cost – NOW I have one of my very own. I’m quite excited. Even then the price – indeed it is Banggood (I’m sure they won’t appreciate that). HT-175 Infrared…
NEW PCB for ESP-GO
You might just like this – I do! Standard problem number one: finding a none-home-made-looking box for the new project. Standard problem number 2: NOT taking a simple on-off light or heater design and turning it into a wife/husband-provoking nightmare with low-voltage boards needing separate mains power supplies. Collectively these…
British v Spanish Mobile Phone Service Providers
Well, of course, everyone has their own story, this is mine. As some f you know, we spent 3 months of our summer in Spain, most of it with me recovering from illness and so probably more than ever, having a working mobile contract was very important this year. We’ve…
The Thermostat revisited
Remember this? I put this Node-Red Dashboard (+ images) stat together January 2017 then promptly forgot about it – thank heavens I blogged the lot, having recently moved home. I find I need a thermostat for our home and yesterday I was in the process of re-inventing the wheel when…
FriendlyArm NanoPi M4
Yesterday in the post came the singularly impressive-looking NanoPi M4 unit complete with supplied eMMC for Android 8 and 16GB uSD for Lubuntu Desktop and the most spectacular heat-sink I’ve ever seen, not to mention (oh, go on then, if you insist) , a tiny Apple-reminiscent mains power supply able…
Web servers and SQLITE Editors Rethink
For some considerable time now I’ve been using Apache (web server) on my various SBCs to present a basic web page, run PHPLITEADMIN (local SLQLite Database Manager and do other menial jobs. A LONG time ago I got rid of MySQL (which I had used on and off along with…
Easy Backup 2
Having satisfied myself that RPI-CLONE does a good job of creating backups of Raspberry Pi (no guarantees you won’t lose data but it hasn’t happened to me yet) I started the search for a solution for other boards. I find the Orange Pi +2E to be a particularly nice piece…
Xiaomi Roidmi 3S Bluetooth Music Car Charger
This Xiaomi Roidmi 3S cigarette-lighter-sized Bluetooth transmitter and car charger has two USB outputs totalling 2.4 amps output AND is able to talk via Bluetooth to your mobile phone so that those without Bluetooth on the car radio can tune into a special low power FM transmission and play their…
SD CARD Backup
Update September 2018 I read about the most convoluted ways to back up SBC systems…. some back up only data, some use arcane commands to do the job – few if any are a single click job for a complete backup that can even handle larger or smaller SDs. That…
Koogeek Smart Light Strip LS1
While we were down at the coast paying a fleeting visit to Gibraltar, a package arrived for me from www.koogeek.com – their LS1 Smart Light Strip – which is available from TomTop – https://www.tomtop.com/p-ls1-1.html Here it is, it arrived well-packed – it is worth noting that apps are available for…
ESP-GO Update–the ILI9340 QD-TECH drivers
There’s a discussion going on in here about the M5 Stack and one of the guys says he wants to use ESP8266 – now then is possibly a good time to announce that I’ve been updating the code in ESP-GO for the ILI9340 and QD-Tech displays. It is all in…
Work in Progress using Docker
Fellow reader and collaborator who has helped me with “the script” over the past two years – Antonio Fragola, aka MrShark has asked me to put up something about his current work in progress. He has begun working on Docker with a view to migrating “the script” to a fully…
The M5 Stack
The M5 Stack looks to be a reasonable use of the ESP32 and for those who need to start from a boxed product with display, it might just have a bright future. In a nutshell this is a pretty looking ESP32-based box with display and buttons. Do with it what…
ESP-GO Deep Sleep Experiment
My latest tests – simple Node-Red code to check the ESP-GO updates as of this morning (v2.4.01) to quickly return temperature/humidity etc. after reboot and before sleeping. With static IP I have it down to around 3 seconds including the return MQTT confirmation. Unit can sleep up to 71 minutes.