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…
Category: General
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…
RGraph with Node-Red
Having gone from spending countless hours staring at HTML5 CANVAS, I’m now at the “meh” stage as it starts to dawn on my how it works. And so it was that I stumbled on RGraph – or put another way, Christmas for widget-lovers. If you’ve been following these blog entries…
The Pine 64
Just a quicky this morning as I’m busy working on a LED for the thermostat control (thanks to some help from the author – I’m quite excited) as well as bench-testing some NanoPi 64 and M3 units. So what you see here is the Pine 64 – which, like the…
Some Background
Far too often in blogs like this we “assume” that everyone is following along, so for the sake of boring regular readers…. the background to much of what you will see in this blog, revolves around my home control project which started off using an Atmega1284 chip as a controller…
Happy New Year 6200+ members
And only days after I wrote that, we’re well over 6,200 of you, registered in here and climbing! Thanks to everyone and especially those who’ve submitted great feedback over the last year. (Update June 2017: That figure is now approaching 7,500!) A quiet New Year’s Eve – out with friends…
Merry Christmas
Some of you may be heading off home to see family so we might not hear from you for a little while. Others will be settling down at home for a Christmas of gadgets… Either way, by Christmas there’s a good chance there will be 6,000 of you signed up…
More Dashboard Goodness
Last week, I got as far as some new buttons on Node-Red Dashboard along with fancy colour change and vibrate – you’ll see some new buttons if you head off back to that entry. So, what’s those round things with numbers in them? No, not more gauges – but CONTROLS…
The Script (Original Article)
It occurs to me that I regularly refer to my “script” – without ever having detailed what it does! I’ll fix that now. The “script” is something Aidan and I originally put together for our own use, mainly to help when running home control systems – to simplify Debian Jessie…
Yule Be Impressed
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…
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…