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…
Category: General
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.
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…