We live in a world of colour and most of us have colour monitors. Why then should we put up with boring terminals? Check out this coloured prompt code.
NEO2 NAS Part One
This started off as a simple bit of fun to see if the FriendlyArm NAS box was any good – I had no idea it would turn out to be so much fun.. read on… My first NAS was the NetGear ReadyNAS duo – some of you may recall this…
NanoPi K2
What, not ANOTHER board from FriendlyArm? And yes, you’d be right to wonder why I’m doing a bunch of articles on them right now – well, it just so happens I got a box of stuff all at once so I thought I’d get them all out of the way…
NEO REBOOT
I have covered the FriendlyArm NEO and NEO2 boards here before now and generally been in favour – but for one little item in common with many other boards – little or no IO support – well, that just changed. Read on… With no apparent way to get to the…
Big Nextion
Quite a while ago now I did a project based on the little Nextion displays, resistive touch-LCD displays which run on serial commands and come with an editor to make simply touch displays for even the simplest of micros. Well, that project has proven to capture a lot of interest…
A Quick Plotly
Some time ago I wrote about HighCharts – a wonderful set of Javascript tools for doing graphs – and I gave an example of getting the graphs into Node-Red. I’ll not repeat that as you have the link above. At the time I’d not added in databases, I’ve since made…
ESP8266 Code Update
Note: As of April 2026 the ROMS website is now deleted. today I mainly use Tasmota and ESPHOME for ESP8266 and ESP32 work – generally in conjunction with Home Assistant. The code that forms a series of articles on this blog has now not been updated for some time –…
Uninterruptible Supplies
Need a power supply with battery backup that shuts off your PI or similar gracefully when the battery gets low and starts up when the battery recovers? I’m sure most of us who play with the likes of Raspberry Pis and other SBC boards as well as other devices, have…
GPIO the Hard Way
I struggled with the title for this one as I figured if I put /sys/class/anything in the title – everyone would run away as I usually do. This entry came about because of my utter annoyance that so many little Linux SBCs out there come with ZERO or very little…
Cheap NodeMCU Boards
This could be the shorted blog I’ve ever written! We’ve been talking about ESP8266 recently and as I was running out of boards, I sent off for some of these from AliExpress – my favourite store next to Ebay. At a total cost of just over £3 they had to…
Thoughts on RAM
These are just thoughts – hopefully someone is going to write in and tell me I have it all wrong. As regular readers will know I have reviewed (and messed with) MANY small Pi-type boards including the Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi, NanoPi etc etc. I’ve also had a go with…
ESP32 First Steps
I said I would not touch the ESP32 until the price came down and true to form, I just received my first ESP32 from AliExpress. Still a little more expensive than I’d like at £5.35 (inc postage came to £6.67) but I felt it was time to make a start.…
Garden Data Collection
This entry is all about InfluxDB, Grafana and a cute little Bluetooth garden sensor! Some time ago a pal of mine and I did some swaps of spare kit and I ended up with a Mi Flora sensor. A rather pleasing looking device, the MI Flora has a 3v lithium…
NanoPi Neo 2
You may well have read my review of the NanoPi NEO back in August 2016 – a nice little H3 unit available in two versions, 256Meg and 512Meg RAM. Well, the new unit has an H5 64-bit processor and comes with 512MB RAM and although there is only one USB…
RTK.GPIO Board
I was recently given the opportunity thanks to a good friend, to check out the RTK.GPIO board, a small PCB with microUSB socket which promises to emulate the IO of a Raspberry Pi. The board, sure enough has a Raspberry Pi connector looking remarkably similar to the Pi with 3v3…
Summer Migration
As Maureen and I start our summer migration to southern Spain, don’t expect anything new in here until around 17th – but of course – people are commenting constantly on various blog entries so I do hope you’re registered so you won’t miss anything. I’m quiet excited, when we get…
ESP12S
I’m looking forward to trying out the new ESP12-S – this one apparently has a better antenna – and by the look of the schematic (see page 15 – thanks Alexander) the resistors on reset, GPI))0,2 and 15 are already there. That should simplify layout somewhat! ai-thinker.com – www.ai-thinker.com/uploadfile/2016/0909/20160909073755898.pdf Hmm,…
Espruino For You Sir
As a once-dedicated C programmer (I learned with the K&R book) I originally dismissed Javascript as an interpreted toy (great for websites of course), that is until I started playing with Node-Red. At that point, after much struggle, I started to get reasonably good with it and once I got…
File Share Quickies
Following on from an initial comment by Keith Howell in the blog about NGROK, Antonio and I were chatting today about TKaiser’s little testing script and I wanted to share something with him. Skype of course is useless at this unless it’s a very small file – but we’ve used…
A Question of Lifespan
Here we started a conversation about SD Lifespan. How can we make our SBC projects run for longer? In comments I’ve seen elsewhere, people seem to think it is OK that a Pi may well fail within a year due to SD – I don’t think that is even REMOTELY…