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…
Category: General
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…
Espruino For You Sir
As a once-dedicated C programmer (I learned with the K&R book) I originally dismissed Javascript as an interpreted toy (great for websites of course), that is until I started playing with Node-Red. At that point, after much struggle, I started to get reasonably good with it and once I got…
A Question of Lifespan
Here we started a conversation about SD Lifespan. How can we make our SBC projects run for longer? In comments I’ve seen elsewhere, people seem to think it is OK that a Pi may well fail within a year due to SD – I don’t think that is even REMOTELY…
Newcastle Maker Faire
What a great day. Newcastle has an annual Maker Faire and it is on this weekend – and what a faire it is. I headed off first thing to get some parking and was pleased to find that Newcastle College had some cheap parking – £4 for the day. I…
Android Phone as Resource
This is the following up the previous Android Phone as Server article. Last update 22/03/2017. Servers: So having now tried various phones and tablets, it does look like the Linux Deploy App on a rooted Android phone makes for a good Debian installation in order to run software like Apache,…
Raspberry Pi Zero WiFi
I should have just entitled this “Raspberry Pi” as it keeps expanding (now covering the rest of the Pi boards – but keep reading).. as you will see, the title is a little restrictive given what we’ve done over the last few days. Friend Antonio over Italy and I (still…
Odds and Ends
Just a few odds and ends… we’ve arrived safely in Spain and I’m not getting quite as much blogging time as I’d like as there are repair jobs to do – but I managed a little item on Node-Red earlier – I’ve had people in here asking for simple-use examples…
The Mint Experiment
Anyone who’s known me for years knows I’m a died in the wool Windows man. Over many years from Windows 3.1 onwards, I’ve done down that road until ultimately all my machines are now Windows 10 – and I have to say that, while it could be argued before Windows…