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…
ESPURNA and SONOFFS
After using many packages to control Itead Sonoffs and even enjoying success with Tasmota which has Alexa compatibility, I’ve recently had a very favourable, exciting, even) experience with Xose Perez’s multi-purpose Espurna IOT firmware on some of my Sonoff power controllers. On the subject of Amazon Alexa, SOME of my…
Feeltech 6900 Signal Generator
You may have seen a recent comment from Peter Tennenbaum in my FY6800 review from last year. His success at obtaining English documentation prompted me to get in touch with the company, the upshot being that the new FY6900 model has just arrived and looking remarkably like the FY6800. I…
Node Red Alexa Remote2
To give this set of nodes their full title, the offering is known as node-red-contrib-alexa-remote2 and has VERY recently been updated. For those of us who’ve been struggling controlling our home devices with various custom packages recently, the best option over the past few weeks seems to be node-red-contrib-amazon-echo –…
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…
Node-Red Persistence
How could I POSSIBLY be so SLOW? For many months, after originally coming up with my own mechanism for making Node-Red variables persistent across power cycling – and then promptly forgetting about it, I’ve been conveniently ignoring the relatively new official way to do this… This morning, just out of…
Xiaomi Mi 4 Smart band
On the surface of it the Xiaomi Mi 4 looks like it’s predecessor, the Mi3, but it is NOTHING like it. The original was/is a fine, mono display smart band which my wife LOVES, but the Mi 4 is a full colour model while still retaining the best part of…
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…
Photo Apps
It just occurred to me that the sub-title of my tech blog infers anything to do with gadgets – and most sunny summer days I find time to take photos, usually of gadgets but also of friends, scenery and local events. I do have a blog for photography – a…
Shelly One WIFI Switch
“Shelly One” is just one example of several (claimed) open source products produced by a company called Shelly who are based, not as you might expect in China’s mega technology city of Shenzhen but in Sofia, Bulgaria. Shelly are not new and there are plenty of videos out there about…
The Script
Regular readers will know about the script that Aidan Ruff and I originally developed to put Node-Red and several other packages onto the Raspberry Pi for our own home control purposes. This has been developed with help from several people and in particular my friend Antonio “Mr Shark”. WELL –…
Sonoff BasicR3 10A
I’m currently blogging about the more expensive 16A Shelly One power controller and already this summer I’ve written about the Gosund units, but regular readers will be aware that I’m a long-term fan of Sonoff and their various low cost controllers. My most recent acquisition is a pair of Sonoff…