You will have seen me write about the excellent Sonoff ESP8266-controlled mains relay switching devices in the past and I went into great detail as to how to program them using the HC2016 software, the only caveat being they don’t have enough FLASH memory for OTA (well, not with my…
VT100 Terminal for HC2018
Well, I had to give it a go, didn’t I – porting the code for the cheap VT100-type serial terminal into the main ESP8266 home control software. BOY was that difficult but… after 2 days of head-scratching – check out the home control manual in the source code repository for…
Cheap Serial Terminal
How about a cheap serial terminal for less than a fiver all-in? In a previous blog entry I’ve been working on more developments for the increasingly powerful home control system using an Arduino as a kind of universal I2c peripheral to the ESP8266. The reason for that is just the…
Arduino 16 bit PWM Revelation
Here is a piece of code I found – quite old now. As most Arduino users will know, the PWM on the 328 chip is a bit… naff at only 8 bits. When attached to LEDS, at the low end, each step is painfully obvious – even value 1 is…
Espressif Save to FLASH–an alternative
In this article I’ll talk about making use of FLASH to store information in the ESP8266 wireless units (I refer here to those with 4Meg or more of FLASH – on the assumption that only the first 2 meg is in use plus a tiny bit at the end)… To clarify…
ADS1115 I2C A/D Convertor
Coming up next on HC2016 project – the ADS1115 I2C 4-channel A/D convertor. This item came from AliExpress – a very nice purple board – very clean – and importantly – very cheap at £1.89. I started off looking at some Adafruit code for a similar chip and immediately spotted…
Faster ESP I2C
Experimenting with I2c on the ESP8266? I am – and I’m having a great time with it. If you’re using my code you don’t really need to think about it but if you’re hunting around for better I2c for the ESP – or maybe interfacing the ESP8266 to Arduino –…
I2C the Easy Way
If you’re going to experiment with I2C – may as well do it the easy way. Having spent the past few days with a desk that looks remarkably like a bowl of spaghetti, I’ve finally gotten around to making a special IOTBEAR board up for the job. 18 each of…
16 Channels of PWM for ESP8266
This morning a little board turned up for me – the advert said “Smart Electronics” – but the board says Adafruit 16-channel 12-bit PWM board. At £1.38 each these represent EXCELLENT value – especially as the Adafruit originals are much more expensive. Nicely made with gold connections and all the…
NOT Rip-Off Britain for Raspberry Pi
Here’s a bit of a reversal.. normally I steer clear of the UK for pricing as we tend to pay over the top… I can’t help thinking I’m reading this incorrectly…. However – here above is RS Components latest pricing for the Raspberry Pi 3 – the latest model –…
Permissions
I’m sure Linux life would be a LOT easier for beginners if it were not for the pesky permissions.. You’ll see in previous blogs that with help from readers, I discovered that the WIRINGOP library will work with H3 chips – and allow access to the pins on for example…
Banana Pi M2
Updated December 13, 2016: Technically referred to as the BP1-M2+ I received this Banana Pi board in the post this morning. It is SMALL – that is, the same width but just a tad wider than the FriendlyArm M1 and M2. But there the similarity ends. Firstly this little thing…
The NanoPi Neo
By now if you read this blog regularly you’ll have heard me rant on about the FriendlyArm boards – mainly because they are inexpensive and actually do work well as Pi alternatives – you’ll also note that I don’t blindly praise them – I’ve still not managed to get the…
Midweek Ramblings
Following my addition of the BME280 code to Home Control 2016, a couple of guys have suggested they might like to see more accuracy than the integer I use for temperature so I’ve added a new polled value {hightemperature} which is simply the temperature value *10 – but with that…
BME280 Sensor Box of Tricks
Temperature, humidity and pressure readings in one chip? Certainly! The BME280. I’ve recently spent more time than I care to think, trying to get a BME280 driver to work – finally done it by adapting some work from this fellow (Cosmin Plasoianu) who’s code is good but was out of date…
Arduino Libraries and ESP8266
So I’m working on a side project – which may or may not go anywhere – to make a working version of my home control 2016 ESP8266 software in the Arduino environment. One popular device is the Dallas DS18b20 temperature sensor, a simple 3 wire device that looks like a…
Adafruit GFX
I’m hoping someone can save me a learning curve here. I’m messing with the Adafruit GFX library here with a view to making a subset of my normal MQTT-based code supporting the little 160*128 LCD displays. All of this is working – I can put text up directly from an…
I2C Continuum
Updated August 07. 2016: This article which started off discussing the “new addition” of i2c to the home control software, is now NOT ONLY about an I2c 2/4 line LCD display facility recently added to the ESP8266 boards – but there’s a PARALLEL version as well, making use of GPIO…
Node-Red on a Phone
I have to hand ALL the credit to Dave at the Node-Red Google Groups for this – and you might want to pop any questions in that direction because I know even less about running Android at the command prompt than I do Debian! Running Node-Red on your Android phone…
Nextion Update
As you may know the home control software can work with Nextion displays and there is a project on the blog on that subject – I note that one or two people are having issues here so rather than reply without pictures – here’s a general update. Currently with the…