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…
Category: General
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.
The Nano Peripheral Update
I mentioned recently in an entry aimed at beginners, that I’ve been installing “the script” and my ESP8266 code on various devices. I now have a backed-up Raspberry Pi 3B+ board set up for testing, with the latest Raspbian and fully up to date Node-Red nodes including my own and…
MCH K305D Power Supply
I just received a neat little switch-mode power supply in the post from Banggood, the K305D. This neat supply runs up to 30 volts output (fully adjustable) and up to 5 amps (constant voltage or constant current) with 0.01v resolution and 0.001a resolution on the blue LED displays. The unit…
Prototype PCB Manufacturing and JLCPCB.COM
So, printed circuit boards – or PCBs to most of the electronics COMMUNITY. My friend and one-time business partner has been designing them for around 35 years so he has been through just about every way of laying out a circuit that there is. This means that he started out…
USB Soldering Iron TS100
I’ve been kindly sent a rather neat tiny soldering iron my the name of TS100. Here are the links: UK: https://ebay.to/JOYaOC and CA: https://ebay.to/2HrYJQ5 This unit comes in a small box with nothing more than the iron (with tip separated for storage) and an allen key with two spare small…
IKALOGIC WS200 and SQ200
In today’s mailbag I received a box containing an IKALOGIC WS200 hand held scope and an SQ200 logic analyser. These French-made units are oscilloscope and logic analyser respectively and they arrived in attractive packaging, directly from IKALOGIC in Limoges, France. Translations to English are spot-on, if only some others used…
Maker Faire Newcastle on 28th 29th April 2018
This year, Maker Faire is at the Science Centre in Newcastle Upon Tyne on 28th and 29th of April. Don’t miss this opportunity to meet up with like-minded enthusiasts, everything from traditional crafts to hi-tech.
More of my Postbag
It could take some time before I’m fully fought up with my various postbags, here is some more: Yokogawa TY720 True RMS Digital Multimeter In the last entry I looked at the UNI-T UT61E Digital Multimeter in this entry I’ll talk about the Yokogawa TY720 True RMS Digital Multimeter. The…
Welcoming in 2018
Here we are in 2018 and I’m sure it will be another great year for IOT. It could be a while before I’m back in the driving seat but for those who have been firing in questions about my health, just to let you know that I am still in…
Why has Peter been so quiet?
I’m posting this entry on behalf of Peter (my name is Jonathan – a long time friend of Peter who he has mentioned a few times in the blog). Peter says: “Unfortunately last Friday (December 15th) I was taken ill and find myself in hospital. While I am making a…
Boxes Galore
Nothing special – just boxes. Those with working 3D printers please ignore me. For the rest… I just took delivery of 20 boxes at less than 50p each and I think this is the best box purchase I’ve ever made – got them from Banggood though I’m sure you can…
OWON SDS1102 Oscilloscope
I thought as the weather is so very bad here in the Northeast of England right now, I’d spend some time reviewing equipment – so I’ve a load of stuff coming in the next few weeks – first off is the Owon SDS1102 oscilloscope.
INA3221 v INA219
Voltage and current monitoring The INA3221 or rather one of the boards based around it, allows for a single power input and up to 3 power outputs –each monitoring voltage and current and all done via I2c. You can (almost) think of this as a triple INA219 – the bidirectional…
A busy Week
It has been a busy week this week – with lots of new things happening. Firstly, there is a brand new update to the RFLINK software, IMHO the best software around for decoding and transmitting signals for a wide range of RF devices – such as weather stations and remote…
Enter the SHT30
The SHT30 is a chip able to measure temperature and humidity and it is very tiny. It is available on a “shield” board for as little as £1.76 including shipping – and will work with any system able to handle I2c – such as my own ESP8266 kitchen-sink code. Now,…
INA219 IC2 Added to ESP8266 code
Just a minor addition to my ESP8266 code – the INA219. Set to 32 volts, 2 amps by default, this i2c addition works with the cheap 0x40 addressed boards – I found them as low as under £2 – these little wonders can measure high side voltage and current !…
ESP8266 DIO mysteries SOLVED
So – ESP8266 – it turns out that some of the newer WEMOS boards require DIO mode for programming the FLASH chips – they just either will not program or will appear to but then not run if you use QIO programming mode (a flag used when flashing). At long…
In General
Just a couple of discoveries of the week: Backing up a system including Node-Red and the Ubuntu Segmentation Error…
Banggood Sale
The Banggood sale has gone now but they do have a Global Shopping Carnival with coupons!