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…
Category: General
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!
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…