Here’s something you don’t see in the garden solar light adverts.. what you’re seeing in the frosty photo below is not untypical weather for the Northeast of England from November through February. When I originally wrote this blog entry I’d had it up to here with cheap garden lights and…
Uninterruptible Power Field Day
I’ve been messing with uninterruptible power supply issues for years and with Raspberry Pi and similar needing (only at leak of course) 3A 5v power, I’ve looked at various alternatives. Here’s a thought for motorists who are IOT enthusiasts as well.. I just solved the issue of ninterruptible power for…
Cheap Water/flood Sensor
Most DIY type will at one time or another have pondered water sensing – I wasted lots of time with cheap resistive garden sensors a few years go before realising that galvanic current would eventually kill them, then I hit on the capacitive sensors – and even one controlled by…
Blitzwolf BW-PF2 Type C Power Bank
And what is this you might ask? Well, I’m a great believer that you can’t have too many QC3.0 power banks (i.e. FAST charging). I use them all the time for our various Smartphones in the UK and in Spain. This model is the and it has a single type…
Bakeey Glass for Pocophone F1
IMHO the most important thing next to having a sparkly SmartPhone is to have sparkly screen protectors to keep the phone looking new. If you follow the blog you’ll know I’m particularly proud of my Pocophone F1 and want to keep it in the best possible condition. To that end…
Rechargeable Desk Cooling Fan with Light
To give this lovely fan its proper title… Or: I love it: “Little Sunny Baldness Fan”. And here’s the fan itself… Smashing job, 3 speeds and a white light inside. Lowest speed almost silent, overall quiet and it has no visible blades, just like an obscenely expensive Dyson. The device…
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…
DIRT Cheap Sonoffs
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 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…
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…
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…
Cubot X19 Budget Phone
Updated August 17 2019: The Cubot X19 smartphone arrived back in May, well packaged, complete with USB charger and lead (the ad describes charging as Type-C fast charge and with its own charger it does charge quite quickly) and the first thing that came to my wife’s attention was the…
Gosund Smart Sockets
A pair of Gosund SP1 16A (i.w. 16 amps) Smart sockets turned up for me today. These German smart sockets plug into your mains power outlet and allow you to control the output either locally or remotely by a variety of means. Now, first off the bat these are not…
MobaXterm Pro
Some time ago, William Taur of Mobatek sent me the latest Pro version of their MobaXterm product, and very nice it is. Mostly in the past I used the excellent WinSCP but then I started using the free version of MobaXterm with great success. Excellent as it is, if you…
Huawei Honor Band 4
In this morning’s post the Honor Band 4 Smartband – and lovely it is too. It has a little USB charge lead that connects to the band and hooks to any USB supply. Sitting in the garden I just happened to have my sadly-no-longer-sold-by-Currys Mixx Charge Power Bank – and…