Regular viewers may recall I reviewed a rather nice TV Android box some time ago – the H96 Max Plus. I’m particularly choosy about these units, again regular readers will know that I’ve used and tested a number of mini-board level products such as various NanoPC boards and others for use as TV boxes and right now back in Spain I’ve left one such unit in place.

Here in the UK, rather than a board level product,  I’ve been using the H96 Max Plus for months now without issue on my 4K 55” TV, producing quality output from Netflix, Amazon TV, iPlayer and much more. UK viewers note that few if any of these units can handle NowTV due to rather childish restrictions from Sky. I use a separate Sky box for NowTV.

Of course there is much more to quality TV than resolution (just as well as most of the material out there is not 4K or anything like it) and one TINY gripe I’ve been harbouring without knowing exactly where to pin the blame, is black level control. I got very annoyed over Christmas when I went to see a pal of mine as his TV seemed to have more consistent blacks than mine. Which brings us to the A5X Max box.

Continue reading The A5X MAX Android 8.1 TV Box →

I always think it is worth periodically re-visiting things you’ve tried before, even when the first attempt led to tears. Things change. And so it was that I pulled out and old (original 4-pin connector) Sonoff Basic recently and gave Tasmota a go. It is some time since I looked at this. Off I went to the Tasmota site looking for a binary file for the Sonoff BASIC. Voila. Binary files for lots of boards including Sonoff Basic.

https://github.com/arendst/Sonoff-Tasmota/releases

Next I had to remember how to flash this on my Windows PC. I tried esptool.py and quickly realised this was not going to work on my PC without figuring out where Python is hiding. It just so happens I have esptool.exe on there, in my c:\espressif\utils folder.

Continue reading Sonoff, Tasmota and Alexa →

If you know me, you know I’m a sucker for pretty colours, which is why I had to have this Geekcreit Large Size Rainbow Colour Clock DIY kit. I kind of glossed over the kit bit when looking at it, but never mind, I’m up for a challenge (and if you think that a couple of SMT chips and a shedload of SMT LEDs is no challenge, I invite you to try it in your mid-60s after a couple of serious operations).

Enough blether… I need to build this.

That’s a stock photo – I’m about 20% through putting the LEDs in and I’m still baulking at the thought of putting the larger IC on the board. Now waiting for Banggood to come back with which resistor is which. My good pal Aidan is popping over this week to give me a hand with the big chip.

More later….

Geekcreit® Large Size Rainbow Color Clock DIY Kit -- https://goo.gl/vEn8Mc 
More Geekcreit Tech -- https://goo.gl/6QzQDy

As I normally rave about RPI-CLONE – I  thought I’d share the dirty laundry this time.

** Update Jan 13 2019

It is looking increasingly likely that the issues I was having were power supply related and one bad SD card. I’ve just finished my 7th successful backup-clone since removing the intermediate battery pack to the Pi and shortening the USB lead. I neglected to note that I’d recently added an Amazon Echo generation 2 DOT into the mix. It is possible that is relevant. Good timing as I’ve just moved to Blynk local server and cracked ESP8266 host names on Windows and I do NOT want to lose that.

** end of update

I have backed up both Pi 2 and Pi 3 hundreds of times, generally without issue, but the last few days I’ve had some cloning problems – generally along the lines of failure – read-only.

Here is a photo of one of my Pi3 units  - 192.168.14.70 – the main controller sits at 192.168.14.71 but is otherwise identical).

Continue reading Raspberry Pi RPI-CLONE Issues →