This lovely, transparent (with armoured black edges) Bakeey case for the Poco X3 phone was always going to be a difficult one to write about. I can show you the case but I need my phone to take a photo so I can’t show it ON the phone 🙂 If…
Bakeey 8-in-1 USB-C Hub Docking Station Adaptor
This inexpensive Bakeey Adaptor does everything – HDMI out, RJ45 network out, TF, SD, a pair of USB 3 outputs and two USB-C outputs – one of which is for power charging (PD – or POWER DELIVERY). This slim unit has USB-C input. In fact the only thing wrong is…
RGB Smart Socket – EH?
I think I’ve seen it all now. What’s an RGB Smart Plug I hear you say? Well, it is just what it sounds like. It’s a smart socket – 3840W (resistive) max with power monitoring – so nothing new there, but they’ve added RGB LEDs inside the socket itself for…
Athom Smart Socket pre-Tasmota’d and Smart Light
I’m so excited about this so I’ll dive straight in. The company is called ATHOM and they make smart sockets and lights pro-programmed with TASMOTA. I took the smartsocket out of the box, plugged it into the mains, told my phone to look for access points and it found “tasmota_D3F950-6480”.…
Second 2021 Treat – a New Doorbell
Regular readers may recall one of last year’s blog entries called “A ZemiSmart Weekend” in which I wrote about, amongst other things, my new (at the time) doorbell, a simple kinetic door push (no batteries) with a UK-plug-based “bell”. This was back in April 2020 and I bought it from…
BigTimer
Node–RED is a fantastic and powerful yet easy to use programming tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways. For more information on Node-Red go to the Node-Red site. BigTimer is my own creation and is (IMHO) the most powerful and best-ever, most…
NodeMCU 10-pack Bargain – first treat of the New Year
My first January 2021 present-to-me arrived between Christmas and NYE while we were hiding at the coast – and I’ve just made a start at testing this pack of ten inexpensive ESP8266-based NodeMCU boards. If you’re not familiar with these and similar products, they are a very popular and generally…
Merry Christmas and a New Poco X3
First things first – I hope all of my subscribers and new readers had a wonderful Christmas – I’m sure it will be FAR from the best on record but hopefully Santa brought you some new gadgets as he did for me. Top of the list for me HAS to…
The rugged Doogee S68 Pro with Titanium Sides
This is a happy story as I’m sure you’re all sick to death of hearing about everyone’s favourite virus – far better to read about great gadgets… This first part is about the new phone I recently received from Banggood, the Doogee S68 Pro (Global version) Smartphone. Is this a…
The YeeLight and node-red-contrib-yeelite-compat-hue
My first 9W E27 RGB+White WiFi Yeelight from Banggood arrived this week. The plan is to run this on Tasmota firmware but as I’m having trouble (as are others) with my Tuya-convert hardware at the moment I ran it initially on the Android YEELIGHT app. Not ideal but they allow…
Crealty 3D LD-002R LCD Resin Printer and MORE
For those looking in for the first time, The LD-002R is not to be confused with the LD-002H which has improved speed and slightly increased cost – so we are looking at a USB connected printer which accepts files on a memory stick for printing. In the beginning How hard…
Smart Devices for 2021 and Beyond
As most of you will know there are a large number of Smart devices out there today -for example – smartplugs which can be run over Zigbee or WiFi – I’ll concentrate only on WiFi in here. Smartplugs vary from 10A capacity which are good for lighting but only useful…
USB-C to USB 3 Adaptors
Seen these? If not, you might find this useful. Sure all the new portable kit today comes complete with USB-C – but what if your computer isn’t 100% up to date? Still using USB 3? I am, so when I found myself with a spare 7-in-1 USB hub, I figured…
VIGOTEC VG-L7X 20W Laser Engraver for Christmas
The full title of this engraver on Banggood’s site is the Vigotec VG-L7X 20W Laser Engraver CNC Router Desktop Automatic Here below is the mandatory box photo complete with thin “manual” which to be fair is generally in decent English. On first opening the package, I found this initial installation…
The Sincerest Form of Flattery
I just happened to be looking at Tasmota – in particular the WS2812 addressable LED drivers – specifically using the TASMOTA-DISPLAY.BIN file – and noted the CLOCK mode complete with example. It works – and works well.. Up to now I have a 60-LED addressable strip clock, a Dallas temperature…
FriendlyArm NanoPi R4S SBC
My Raspberry Pi4 is in the process of upgrading to today’s NEW upgrade to Raspberry Pi OS, the artist formerly known as BUSTER. Done – and in case you are wondering – here is the post-upgrade login message in the console. “Linux rpi418buster 5.4.79-v7l+ #1373 SMP Mon Nov 23 13:27:40…
Seeed Studio WT32-S1 Module for Ethernet to Serial
The WT21-S1 is an ESP-32-based embedded serial to Ethernet module. The module includes a full TCP/IP stack – etc etc – basically you can use it to program boards normally programmed serially – where that is not practical, by plugging this board into Ethernet via RJ45 and the relevant IO…
Solar HD1080P IP67 Camera
This device was installed way back to summer 2019 and this update is December 2020 – the Solar powered HD 1080p Wireless PIR waterproof security outdoor IP67 camera from Banggood. I’ve resurrected this article as I originally gave it a bad review as I felt it was unreliable – now…
PiVPN (OpenVPN + WireGuard) Pi-hole and ZeroTier
This recently updated blog entry started off back in 2019 as a simple comment on the amazingly useful PiVPN with OpenVPN and has branched out a lot since then – now covering the (now default) WireGuard option) and the completely unassociated ZeroTier VPN solution. Before we start, here is a…
My Node-Red Dashboard Controls for 2021
Some of you may recall my work on Node-RED Dashboard buttons which all started in 2016 and which then (after a health-related break) received an update at the end of 2019 as I started to get to grips with dashboard templates. Well, I’m back to it again and this time,…