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…
Category: General
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.
Nano Peripheral Continued Development
Update July 15, 2018 It has been said before and will be said again that I often refer to the Arduino Nano when I mean a copycat Nano board OR copycat Mini Pro. Let’s complicate this a little and add in variations using the 168 and 328 chips.
Auto Aligning Solar Tracker
My friend Aidan who many of you will know through this blog, has just put an entry into Hackaday about his self-powered, auto aligning solar tracker. He is building a house in Aragon in Spain with no electricity but he’s compensating for that with lots of solar power – which…
ISDT Smart Charger C4
As you can imagine, I’ve looked at many chargers, lots of them have proven to be disappointing, many are just plain boring. Early days but this ISDT C4 charger (from Banggood) looks neither. Indeed it looks marvellous. From initial impression through to operation this looks like a complete winner to…
Inexpensive 200W Car Inverter
I just bought this unit for the car from Ebay – 200w mains out and 6.8a total over 4 USB sockets, small and light, too. A far cry from inverters of only a few years ago and for a measly £20 + post.
Bluetooth Speaker Giveaway
Uptated June 10, 2018. You will have seen my blog entry recently about goodies from Inateck including their The BP1109 Bluetooth speaker which I’m now using a lot… it is lovely. Well, they wanted another bite at the cherry so to be in with a chance to win one of…
Big Timer Status
I occasionally get comments in the blog about people having problems with BigTimer, virtually all get resolved by users themselves and it is quite some time since BigTimer has actually had any problems, so for clarification, here it is working alongside Blynk, inject nodes and with MQTT. I am currently…
Deceitful Advertising
Sometimes I wonder what has happened to trading standards in the Internet age. Today it is apparently perfectly ok to lie through your teeth when advertising, particularly when you can later hide behind the language barrier. See particularly bollocks advert here at AliExpress. They don’t do themselves or us any…
OLED just a quick one
Blog reader Ian Sexton has some boards going cheap for people who want ESP8266 based OLED. http://myiot.co.uk/ESP_OLED/ – I’ll leave it up to Ian to comment further.