Not a company I’ve ever associated with home control, Blitzwolf do some decent battery packs – but now they have a neat little IOT mains relay controller of their own. not to mention their own mains relay control board just like Sonoff (well, not really). So, first off the bat,…
Category: General
Besiter 20,000maH Power Pack
This on’e a little more beefy than previous power packs I’ve recently looked at (I did sayI had a backlog). The is a solid-looking and only JUST pocket-sized battery pack able to handle type-C, micro-usb and full USB-S connections as well as being a Quick-Charge compatible battery pack. The highest…
A95X Android 9 TV Box
Ok, that’s done. I am more grateful than you might imagine for a speedy delivery from China – Banggood sent me the latest A95X TV box which is around £37 inc post right now. But perhaps the main reason I’m grateful is we just arrived back in the UK from…
Uninterruptible Power Field Day
I’ve been messing with uninterruptible power supply issues for years and with Raspberry Pi and similar needing (only at leak of course) 3A 5v power, I’ve looked at various alternatives. Here’s a thought for motorists who are IOT enthusiasts as well.. I just solved the issue of ninterruptible power for…
Bakeey Glass for Pocophone F1
IMHO the most important thing next to having a sparkly SmartPhone is to have sparkly screen protectors to keep the phone looking new. If you follow the blog you’ll know I’m particularly proud of my Pocophone F1 and want to keep it in the best possible condition. To that end…
Rechargeable Desk Cooling Fan with Light
To give this lovely fan its proper title… Or: I love it: “Little Sunny Baldness Fan”. And here’s the fan itself… Smashing job, 3 speeds and a white light inside. Lowest speed almost silent, overall quiet and it has no visible blades, just like an obscenely expensive Dyson. The device…
DIRT Cheap Sonoffs
If you are into home control, then unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve almost certainly heard of Sonoff – Sonoff BASIC is their cheap power controller… recently upgraded to R3. Well, until October 31, Banggood have a VERY special price on the R2. I’ve been using these for…
Node-Red 1.0 b3 Trials
This one is only for Raspberry Pi / Node-Red fans. ALL SORTED – everything works – so this is here merely to help others and maybe to encourage a better setup for I2C, RPI GPIO in Node-Red 1.0 official, serial and SQLITE3? Here’s a thing – don’t even THINK about…
RPI4 Network Lesson
This blog entry was last updated mid-September 2019 and covers a wide range of issues I’ve had and resolved since the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer (SBC) and the “Buster” update to the (Linux Debian-based) Raspbian operating system, in particular in setting up the networking and hostname…
Diamond USB Wine Cork Light
As far as simple gimmicks go, this new one is a “corker”. As many of you know, I’m a sucker for LED gadgets and have them all over the place. The full title for this winner is (corrected English spelling) “Colourful Diamond Shape USB Rechargeable Wine Cork LED Bottle Light”.…
Alexa, Raspberry Pi and Sonoff
Updated July 26, 2019: I am using a combination of Echo Dot generation 1 and generation 3 here in Spain. Amazon insist on using port 80 for gen 3 Echos, a port already used by something else on my Raspberry Pi 3-based home control system. I am using port 8980…
Alfawise T9 Bracelet
To give it the full title, this entry is about the Alfawise T9 Body Fat Fitness Tracker (or Smart Bracelet). With a 0.96 inch screen, the T9 uses an App (Android or IOS) called Gloryfit (I use the Android version from the Playstore). The bracelet uses an NRF52832 CPU and…
Charger Doctor
No doubt you’ve seen ads for the little “Charger Doctor” gadget from China – well, my advice is to avoid it like the plague. I have two of them, I’ve used them in the past but never on a Raspberry Pi. It turns out that given a 5.2v input, one…
Samsung Galaxy and Gear Watches
So the latest is that the new Gear 4 watch won’t be called that at all, just Samsung Galaxy watch – and for anyone who has been living in a cave for some time(I have, but a cave with WIFI) can there be any doubt that this is the best…
The Umidigi F1 Smartphone
Updated June 14, 2019: So many phones out there, so much choice, so much rubbish. When it came to updating my own phone last year, I took advice from my friend Antonio (Mr Shark) and went for the Xiaomi Pocophone F1 and as it turns out, it was good advice…
Sonoff S26 Wifi Smart Plug
You may well have seen plenty of reviews and adverts for the Sonoff S26 WiFi Smart plug so I won’t go into too much technical detail here other than to say this VERY inexpensive wall socket can easily be re-flashed to run alternative software for those not to keen on…
ESP GO update and more
A minor update for ESP-GO – still working on the Espressif SDK 3.1 version as RBOOT is still not OTA-ing reliably (everything else does)– but the SDK 2.1 version is working a treat – very reliable. There WAS an issue due to some recent updates, with the web setup –…
Blog changes
In order to minimise spam, I have removes some email subscriptions where the user names looked automated. This process is nowhere near perfect but is essential to protect valid readers/subscribers. I’ve also changed email newsletter requests to double-opt-in – that is, if you newly request emails from the blog, you…
EleksMaker Pro Laser Engraver
Update February 28, 2019 Last year year I put together this excellent A3 laser engraving machine. Originally, a 500mW laser module arrived complete with its own power supply (the laser which was not included in the basic kit). It turns out that was the wrong laser and now I have…
BigTimer and getMoonTimes
I just spent ages debugging issue with theSunCalc module used in Node-Red-Contrib–BigTimer. It turns out that the getMoonTimes module doesn’t seem to handle the alwaysUp and alwaysDown methods the way one might expected – these do not return FALSE if not TRUE – they return undefined – that took some…