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…
Category: General
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!
Banana Pi Zero
Does this look familiar to you? I’ve not had a chance to test one of these but I thought it worth bringing the Banana Pi Zero to your attention and can make some preliminary comments..
Nano I2c Peripheral
My “nano peripheral” started life as a simple attempt to expand the ESP8266 by making use of the IO on a really cheap Chinese board, an Arduino Nano equivalent Chinese £1.20 rip-off (After all, any Arduino is basically little more than an Atmel chip with reset and power circuitry and…
The TOMO Power Supply
Well, I started to make a video of this thinking it was going to be a great new uninterruptable supply. I’d listened to others, I’d read the spec (or so I thought) and this was to be the new saviour of battery supplies. The TOMO unit comes in different sizes,…
I2C For Everyone
There was a time in the distant past (in my case this morning) when running I2c natively in Node-Red on anything other than a genuine Raspberry Pi was a nightmare. Not any more. So in a recent blog I’ve covered a pair of Node-Red nodes which allow GPIO access in…
SSD1306 on the NEO Plus2
You might recall some time ago I wrote about using Python on the Orange Pi Zero etc to run the little SSD1306-based displays. Despite that being successful I did have a nagging doubt about the LUMA library because later on – when doing some apt-get upgrades I got a segmentation…
OTA
A quick note – I have made all of my sites secure (https://) and so the original OTA site for my ESP8266 ROMS (www.scargill.net) is no longer appropriate. roms.scargill.net is now the place to go (which redirects elsewhere and also has a pretty interface) – sorry for any inconvenience. The…
Today’s Mailbag
I have to say, it felt a little like Christmas today when the Correos post-lady turned up with a plastic container full of packages from China for me. Among the many items in today’s post were the two you see above – a WEMOS board (i.e. ESP-12 + power supply)…
Challenge for the Day
The issue of running out of FLASH space on the ESP8266 is now resolved – if you are interested in how FLASH memory on the ESP8266 works – especially using the Unofficial Development Environment with the official SDK and RBOOT works – you may find this useful. I now have…
Fonts Galore
In recent previous articles I’ve been working with various displays and various processors – and one thing that comes to the fore is the importance of fonts. TTF fonts are pretty useless for small microprocessor projects as the processing overhead can be significant – and though there are many standards…
Silence of the Lambs
I’ve spent WAY too many hours working on ILI9340 display updates for my ESP8266 kitchen sink C code but at least now I’m getting somewhere – that is – fast, easy serial or MQTT access to the display with multiple fonts. Note – that initial tests indicate this also applies…
SSD1306 with Python
Following on from earlier articles – this is as much a collection of notes than anything else – and there’s a demo video in here of the SD1306 using the Luma library on the Orange Pi Zero. After months of thinking the only SBC I’d get working with I2c was…
Colour Terminal Login
I made this as a continuation of my current work with the NEO2 but there is no reason why this could not be adapted to other boards. There are also many ways to achieve the same thing i.e. colourful terminal login – this is merely a what I chose to…
NEO2 NAS Part Two
I’ve separated this off as it has gained a life of it’s own. When I originally opened up the NAS box from FriendlyArm and plugged in my NEO2 (same company) I’d just planned on trying out the free NAS software. Little did I know how far this would develop…
Big Nextion
Quite a while ago now I did a project based on the little Nextion displays, resistive touch-LCD displays which run on serial commands and come with an editor to make simply touch displays for even the simplest of micros. Well, that project has proven to capture a lot of interest…