My usual stance is to be nice to Itead, I’ve been dealing with them for some time and although I have absolutely no commercial or personal tie up with them, they do send product samples from time to time as do many others – and I usually end up writing…
Size Matters… Neo AIR
When it comes to size, this one is as good as any… the FriendlyArm Nano Pi Neo Air. You’ve probably read my blog about the Nano Pi Neo, a device I can only describe as “cute” because of it’s really small size – but powerful non-the-less. Well, the AIR version…
I2C Expansion for Pi and ESP8266
Want 64 GPIO pins on your ESP8266 or Raspberry Pi? Read on. If like me you are not THAT familiar with I2c, you might find the results of my experiments interesting and perhaps even useful. If like me you are not THAT familiar with I2c, you might find the results…
Toying with HA-BRIDGE
Thanks to readers in here I’m having a play with HA-Bridge to act as a device gateway between my home control (generally ESP8266) devices and Amazon Echo. I’m only scratching the surface and haven’t gotten past “Alexa, turn X on”, “Alexa turn X off” and “Alexa set X to 30%” …
Netdata
This is NEAT – reader Jay brought this to my attention this afternoon – here’s the link. So Netdata is a system monitoring tool – but better than any I’ve seen up to now – certainly on the Raspberry Pi – so I simply followed the instructions in that link,…
POW, TH16 AND DUAL
Ok, this entry will be in 2 parts – I’ll do some digging soon – but as I’ve had several requests for this… So what you’re looking at above are the Sonoff Pow, TH16 and DUAL mains controllers. These are ESP8266-based low cost controllers to turn things on and off.…
The Light Fantastic
This morning, a long-forgotten package turned up for me – a cheap but accurate light level sensor from China – claimed to be around 1 lux accuracy and giving a direct output in lux. A small board is available here in Britain for around £4 or the identical board from…
Fauxmo Alexa Delights
I’m going to cut a very long story short here. I’ve been looking at ESP8266 emulations of WEMOs because up to now this seems to be a popular device to emulate when using with your talking Amazon Echo. If anyone wants to come up with something that will take ANY…
Node-Red Objects to File and Back
This is a major re-write of a year-old blog. At the time, I simply wanted to store a global object in a file and retrieve it. Things have changed, I realise the way we did this was awful – hence the re-write. One way is to save the object as…
Last Monday of the Month
Closing this one off – there are solutions in here and thanks to all. I thought I’d kluged this function together correctly but apparently not. I’m looking to be able to enter the 4th Monday of the month (ie today) as an example – and get true – getting false…
Alexa Enlightenment
Last updated November 16, 2016: In a recent blog entry I told you how we’d been playing with Amazon Echo (Alexa) and got it working. Well, nearly. It turns out that what SEEMS obvious in the system is not all it seems – but read on as we’ve had success.…
Alexa Node Red and SSL
It’s running. I’m very chuffed. Yesterday I picked up my Amazon Dot – which is basically the big ECHO unit without the big speaker – it has a little one instead. What is Alexa? Before I go any further – let me backtrack for those who’ve been in – well,…
A Quickie on Itead and CE
I recall a couple of questions in earlier blogs about Itead (Sonoff) and CE. Well, they’ve just written to me to confirm that “CE marking on Sonoff products does mean Conformity European, not China Export.” which should set some minds at ease – they also sent me the test reports.…
Another Weekend of Experiments
I’ve just been up to Northern Spain with a friend and our wives looking at some property up there and when we got to our hotel and got the wine open, Aidan showed me his new toy – Amazon Echo. The Echo Moment Well, I was so excited I’ve ordered…
Variable Persistence in Node-Red
It is my understanding that Node-Red will eventually have persistent variables – but while we’re waiting – this is how I do it. Using the global.get and global.set mechanisms, I store a single object. So – when Node-Red pops up it looks to the SD for that object – if…
Node Red Sunday
It is Sunday, I’ve done my 4,000 steps down to the village for coffee and back and I’m having a play. I use Node-Red on a Raspberry Pi to control just about everything in two houses – as my confidence in the setup has grown, I’m currently keeping the Pi…
IOT Manager Revisited
This started off as a very short blog some time ago – you’ll see comments below but I’ve re-written it. I occasionally like to revisit stuff I have reviewed or played with ages ago because, well, things change. Had I not persevered with ImperiHome I would not now have a…
Sparkly new Pi
Just a very quick one (and somewhere to park the conversation)– there’s a new Raspberry Pi update out promising a new smoother, simpler look, better video etc. Up to now it looks like the claim is correct. I have several RPI installations…including TightVNC and so I didn’t want to lose…
Arduino STM32
Having decided I needed a more powerful generic peripheral board than the Arduino, I sent off for some STM32 boards to China – they got lost in the post. Meantime my friend Aidan sent me a nice little black board marked “JM ELECTRONIC STM32F10XC8 SYSTEM BOARD”. It came complete with…
A busy Week
It has been a busy week here in the cave and as well as reviewing the likes of the new Sonoff TH16 units I’ve been doing various improvements – not to mention getting to grips with the VT100 terminal commands, squeezing the best from the somewhat dwindling Spanish heatwave and…