Or not – as the case may be. This is my attempt to revive an old, bust Christmas decoration. The original Christmas candle decoration was a white casing, simply filled with static, old-school filament lighting – and as happens one of them went by the by. We don’t keep spares…
Category: General
New This Weekend
Over the weekend I have added a new MENU item to the blog – COMMENTS – thanks to MrShark for that idea. Menu top right. The page shows the last 100 comments which will hopefully be useful. I’ve also added an experimental e-newsletter (again on request, several people said they’d…
How Not To Do PCBs
My usual stance is to be nice to Itead, I’ve been dealing with them for some time and although I have absolutely no commercial or personal tie up with them, they do send product samples from time to time as do many others – and I usually end up writing…
Size Matters… Neo AIR
When it comes to size, this one is as good as any… the FriendlyArm Nano Pi Neo Air. You’ve probably read my blog about the Nano Pi Neo, a device I can only describe as “cute” because of it’s really small size – but powerful non-the-less. Well, the AIR version…
Toying with HA-BRIDGE
Thanks to readers in here I’m having a play with HA-Bridge to act as a device gateway between my home control (generally ESP8266) devices and Amazon Echo. I’m only scratching the surface and haven’t gotten past “Alexa, turn X on”, “Alexa turn X off” and “Alexa set X to 30%” …
Netdata
This is NEAT – reader Jay brought this to my attention this afternoon – here’s the link. So Netdata is a system monitoring tool – but better than any I’ve seen up to now – certainly on the Raspberry Pi – so I simply followed the instructions in that link,…
Last Monday of the Month
Closing this one off – there are solutions in here and thanks to all. I thought I’d kluged this function together correctly but apparently not. I’m looking to be able to enter the 4th Monday of the month (ie today) as an example – and get true – getting false…
Arduino STM32
Having decided I needed a more powerful generic peripheral board than the Arduino, I sent off for some STM32 boards to China – they got lost in the post. Meantime my friend Aidan sent me a nice little black board marked “JM ELECTRONIC STM32F10XC8 SYSTEM BOARD”. It came complete with…
A busy Week
It has been a busy week here in the cave and as well as reviewing the likes of the new Sonoff TH16 units I’ve been doing various improvements – not to mention getting to grips with the VT100 terminal commands, squeezing the best from the somewhat dwindling Spanish heatwave and…
ESP SDK and RBoot Woes
Remember I did an article entitles Serial Woes? Well that’s been changed to serial success as we found bugs in tools and gained an understanding of the USB FTDI handshaking lines – which altogether led to improvements in the Node-Red Arduino node and a completely working solution for USB Serial…
Chip First Looks
Right now I’m finishing up my installation on the little CHIP board – only to find that WEBMIN would not work – and why is that? Well, the entire WEBMIN site down and also this morning – SOURCEFORGE website was down!!! it’s back up now and webmin is now…
Blog Fixes
Apologies if you’ve been checking the blog today and noticed it appear in a smorgasbord of colour. I’ve been trying to fix an issue with login and menus – and in the end, started from scratch. Hopefully now all is working well. This all started with a note to ask…
Cricket Simulator
You would think there would be loads of these floating around, but no, people make them the hard way. So here, rescued from my original wordpress site – is my Digistump (Arduino) cricket generator (sound simulator). I figured this out back in 2014 while sitting in the sun in Spain.…