My original ESCAM solar camera arrived In July from Banggood (links below) – marked as ESCAM Model YN88-WIFI-130W and with the simple name “Solar Camera”. Much more on that lower down but first – here is it’s replacement – the “Watchmen” Solar WIFI Camera and what a beauty (note I…
Bakeey Watchstraps for Xiaomi Mi 3/4
These watchstraps are pretty and more importantly CHEAP. One of the great things about the Xiaomi Mi 3 and 4 bands is that they are just a simple black module and there are loads of replacement straps out there for them. I like the lime green one personally but at…
NGINX and Reverse Proxy
Mr Shark recently wrote a comment which I believe warrants it’s own blog entry, so see below (update August 7, 2019). Despite still showing Apache in “the script”, I have replaced Apache with Nginx with success and so has Mr Shark (Antonio) so feel free to use this separate script…
RPi-Clone with RPi Buster and beyond
See the later blog entry about RPi-4 and Buster as issues I had here have been resolved. No doubt there are many of you out there with Raspberry Pi single-board Computers who have for some time, like me been using “rpi-clone” to successfully clone/backup their Pi to known good SDs…
Dock Dock!
I’m not really sure what to make of this one though it is starting to grow on me. A Paris-based start-up company with website www.dockdock.io just sent me a sample of their new product. The slogan on their website is “Make Your Tablet Great Again!”. What you get for €28…
Bakeey H8 Blood Pressure Diamond Bracelet
Ok, so it isn’t real diamond, but the Bakeey H8 Blood Pressure Stainless Bracelet does a good job of looking the part for an inexpensive band. My wife has a nice Mi3 watch – good battery life but a tad boring and like most of these cheap bands, it is…
RabbitMQ MQTT Broker
Here’s a guest post by my close friend and collaborator Aidan Ruff. You’ll usually find him talking about his solar home in Spain or the kind of IOT stuff I do, in this instance, where I swear by Mosquitto MQTT and am currently looking at the even easier-to-install Node-Red-Contrib-Aedes (zero…
Diamond USB Wine Cork Light
As far as simple gimmicks go, this new one is a “corker”. As many of you know, I’m a sucker for LED gadgets and have them all over the place. The full title for this winner is (corrected English spelling) “Colourful Diamond Shape USB Rechargeable Wine Cork LED Bottle Light”.…
BigTimer and Amazon Polly Notifications
Sometimes it can be helpful to think outside of the box and I just did. We were discussing getting Amazon Echo to give out arbitrary notifications from a Raspberry Pi + Node-Red installation and after messing about with this for a while I remembered I have an Amazon AWS account…
Alexa, Raspberry Pi and Sonoff
Updated July 26, 2019: I am using a combination of Echo Dot generation 1 and generation 3 here in Spain. Amazon insist on using port 80 for gen 3 Echos, a port already used by something else on my Raspberry Pi 3-based home control system. I am using port 8980…
I7E Alfawise Fitness Tracker
The I7E Fitness Tracker bracelet is my second bracelet of the day – this one came from Gearbest and comes in an adequate if basic case. As you can see, the bracelet is quite attractive. The App is the freely downloadable Zeroner Health Pro app available in both the Android…
Alfawise T9 Bracelet
To give it the full title, this entry is about the Alfawise T9 Body Fat Fitness Tracker (or Smart Bracelet). With a 0.96 inch screen, the T9 uses an App (Android or IOS) called Gloryfit (I use the Android version from the Playstore). The bracelet uses an NRF52832 CPU and…
QC 3.0 Car Chargers
That’s it, all my “normal” USB chargers are gone – worse than useless for charging modern phones – and today the mail brought the second of a pair of purchased QC3.0 car chargers – I believe from AliExpress or Banggood. Look up this model in their ads based on price…
SD Speeds and Reliability
For years I’ve been promoting Samsung and Sandisk cards for use with SBCs such as the Raspberry Pi and similar. This article checks out ne A2 class cards and seems to come to the conclusion that the latter hold no benefits – indeed that the Samsung Evo+ in particular is…
Umidigi S3 Pro Phone
The Umidigi S3 Pro smartphone arrived for me today from Banggood – and very nice looking it is. This large (6.3” FHD – 2340x1080px) phone is inexpensive but sports some great features such as 48Mpx camera images. But here’s a point – it is common to get maximum resolution out…
Raspberry Pi 3/4 Power
For one of my (up to date) Raspberry Pi (SBC) installations, I have a 5v supply able to deliver sufficient power i.e. over 3 amps… I don’t need a full uninterruptible supply, but I thought it would be nice to use one of my USB battery packs in between the…
Raspberry Pi 4 Arrival
My 2GB Pi4 arrived from the UK. My good friend sent me a micro-HDMI to HDMI adaptor along with the Pi and a 3d-printed case he made – except he didn’t…. the adaptor is a micro-USB to HDMI adaptor – NOT what the RPI4 uses. Because I’m impatient I’d already…
Alexa NotifyMe Skill + Node Red
Here’s another winner for Raspberry Pi (though not specifically) and thanks to my good friend Aidan Ruff for taking time out of his busy schedule and bringing this to my attention. As regular readers know, I try to use Node-Red for just about every aspect of my home control here…
Charger Doctor
No doubt you’ve seen ads for the little “Charger Doctor” gadget from China – well, my advice is to avoid it like the plague. I have two of them, I’ve used them in the past but never on a Raspberry Pi. It turns out that given a 5.2v input, one…
Raspberry Pi 4 + Buster
The new Raspberry Pi 4 is out and about. The new model has something folk have been screaming for i.e. 2GB and 4GB RAM options, not only that but BUSTER, the new version of Raspbian which is not only supported but recommended – and it is backward compatible. In my…