I just spent ages debugging issue with theSunCalc module used in Node-Red-Contrib--BigTimer.

It turns out that the getMoonTimes module doesn’t seem to handle the alwaysUp and alwaysDown methods the way one might expected – these do not return FALSE  if not TRUE – they return undefined – that took some figuring out.

I started with try-catch but that failed also. Simply checking as follows did the trick:

if (typeof moons.rise==='undefined')
moonrise=1440;
else
{
date2=moons.rise; moonrise = (date2.getHours() * 60) +
date2.getMinutes();
}              

if (typeof moons.set==='undefined')
moonset=0;
else
{
date3=moons.set; moonset = (date3.getHours() * 60) +
date3.getMinutes();
}           

I’m pretty sure this is now fixed as of BigTimer 2.1.7

Thanks to Aidan Ruff for his help in this one.

Today was a good day (well, apart from the UK Northeast weather which was rubbish as it has been all year so far.  Thanks to some great help from guys on discordapp.com I discovered a cure for a phantom subnet issue that has had me worried for days now. I also found a fix to make my new Amazon Dot version 3 units work in Node-Red without being the dreaded ROOT user… so let’s get started… this blog entry is really just a record for me and a catch up for any of the guys who were helping out…

Continue reading A good day for Alexa →

Can I give the Raspberry Pi any MORE to do? This started off as a plea for help – as I could not find a way to get reliable reporting of changed devices on my network – as you’ll see, now CRACKED thanks to readers and in particular Mr Shark.

I’ve tried Glasswire on PC, Nmap on Pi and Advanced IP scanner on PC… the latter detects devices like ESP8266 on the network no problem – but could I HELL find a way to show JUST devices connected since the last scan.

Continue reading Devices recently connected to the network →

I remember reading, less than a month ago, a blog entry called “The Mysterious ESP-EYE" in which it is stated that there is no information on the Espressif site on this interesting little camera module. Well, I’ll correct that – there most certainly is now and here’s the link. https://www.espressif.com/en/products/hardware/esp-eye/overview

The ESP-EYE module is a little PCB with a camera and an ESP-32. Rather than print potentially out-of-date info here, I’ll just point you in the right direction for those interested. Here is a link for ordering info, the ESP-EYE Getting Started Guide and the ESP-EYE Reference Design notes all in one place. The ordering info is dated TODAY (Jan31, 2019) and the others are a few days old.

Continue reading Espressif ESP-EYE Board →

Some time ago after using USB chargers (and USB battery units) since late last century and having been constantly disappointed by their performance when charging phones, I started to get very selective. At the risk of boring experts in here, a short history…

The first change I started to make was to look for short, thick USB cables…. this is always a good thing. But the real breakthrough for me was noticing that the charger that came with my phone, even though small, performed considerably better than larger generic USB supplies. Why is that you might ask? Well, you’re probably aware of “QuickCharge 2.0 and 3.0” – essentially protocols for charging those phones suitably equipped, more rapidly than normal. Though charge leads that minimise voltage drops are essential, that’s not the end of the story and there are more protocols out there than QuickCharge, not all of which are documented. See further down for QuickCharge 4.0 and car Quick Charge chargers. This is getting exciting.

Continue reading Phone Charging Epiphany 2 →