Today’s my lucky day, first the postman then couriers – you’d think it was Christmas. The Z-turn board from Myr looks at first glance like many other boards out there – it is around the size of a Raspberry Pi. The layout is immaculate with resistors and other components grouped…
Free GPS for the Weekend, Sir?
Well, not QUITE – the Navspark Mini + UART to USB adaptor is free – but with a caveat of postal shipping charges. http://navspark.mybigcommerce.com/navspark-mini-uart-to-usb-adapter/ Already the more savvy of you will have noticed a treat here. Let’s say you have no interest whatsoever in GPS – the second half of…
The Udoo Neo
The Udoo Neo (www.udoo.org) arrived in my postbag today. Described as “The Ultimate Single Board Mini-PC for Android and Linux” – the Neo is the top end of the range and the full version is $64.90 plus tax/shipping etc. So £45 – probably £60 by the time you’re done –…
Quick Web Page
No sooner had I finished my new Debian Jessie installation (see previous blog) than I tested it – I typed in “http://jessie2” – nothing – zilch. Turns out that even the latest Raspbian doesn’t do this properly – so – off I went and: sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin That…
Headless Pi Installation
This blog entry refers to installing Jessie, Node Red and other utilities on a Pi 2 (not Pi 1 – there is a minor startup issue with Node-Red with that right now) specifically from the November 2015 Jessie image on the Raspberry Pi site. Grab the November 2015 Jessie image…
Raspberry Pi Volume in Node Red
Over the course of my many experiments with the Raspberry Pi and similar I have had constant problems with volume – I remember wasting ages with the Orange Pi – no WAY could I get sound to come out of the analog output. Things are a bit better with the…
Nextion and ESP8266
Ever since I fell in love with the little Nextion displays I’ve been thinking about a little ESP8266 board to go with them – well, I’ve been beaten to it. Today I received in the post a little box from Guy Molinari with his efforts – I have to say…
ThingBox
Update 03/01/2016 17:00: I spent (wasted) much of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day setting up a brand new “Jessie” installation on a Raspberry Pi 2, at the end of which I had managed to put 2 copies of Node-Red on the same machine, the sound would not come…
Espresso Lite
I could have sworn I wrote about these – but apparently not! Anyway… the Espresso Lite (http://www.espert.co/) is a small board based on the ESP Vroom02 module and the board concentrates on the prototyping 0.1 loving community – a good thing !! I have one of these sitting in front…
Linkit Smart 7688
This is interesting… so in the post between Christmas and New Year I received one of these in the post. The Linkit Smart 7688 arrived in the form of a small box about the size of a box of matches. The unit itself is a PCB with metal screen (note…
Happy New Year
Just wasted part of the day trying to get Python 3 working properly on an upgraded Raspberry Pi 2 updated from Wheezy to Jessie without luck – very depressing – so I think an early night (yes, on NYE – having seen the fireworks in Moscow and the “special” fireworks…
A successful Techy Day
So much going on today I thought I’d put the lot into one blog entry. So, I’ve spent the day with my pal playing with one of several IOT solutions – familiar to regular readers – node-red-contrib-ui. This just keeps getting better. So we spent our afternoon getting to grips…
ESP 32 Unofficial Development Kit
Michael Grigorev has released a Beta version of Unofficial Development Kit for Espressif ESP32 (Windows) From Michael: The kit includes the following components and tools:* Unofficial GCC compiler for SoC Xtensa L108.* Official Espressif ESP32 RTOS SDK v1.1.0* Documentation for SoC ESP32.* Examples in the firmware source code in C…
Node Red Speech – The Sequel
Some time ago, I wrote about speech output (text to speech) on the Raspberry Pi using Node Red. Well, that’s been running just fine but like most things – it works until it doesn’t. In this case the nice people at Google have decided it is time to make money…
Node Red UI Mysteries
Yes I did think when writing the title that it reminded me of “Ruth Rendell Mysteries”. There are times when I consider taking up a new career in bricklaying and this is one of them. So I’m working with Node-Red and the UI (node-red-contrib-ui) which has a FUNCTION node which…
Pm2, Node-Red and the Rock
Well, this isn’t really about the Rock – but does this scenario mean anything to you? You’ve installed Node-Red on a new setup of Debian… and while it has always worked in the past, it just isn’t having it – you can run manually but attempts to run at powerup…
ESP 32 Update
An update for you. As you may know the ESP-32 is Espressif’s latest venture, a new, hopefully more powerful alternative to the ESP8266 – with Bluetooth 4 and all sorts of other goodies. I received my ESP-32 module this week along with 0.1” header adaptor board. All very nice you…
Christmas 2015
Just a quick note to wish our many subscribers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Our plans for Christmas are simple – we’ll be spending time with family and friends. Sadly in the modern world many people who have come to be friends are scattered all over…
Radxa Rock Pro
Up to now, my delving into tiny computers has been limited to the Raspberry Pi, the Pi2, Zero and the Orange Pi. The latter still isn’t doing it for me as the latest attempt to get it working (DietPi) turned out to be not so good (no hardware acceleration, no…
Thermostat Christmas Wishes
Still ploughing away with the thermostat side of my home control. Having had working code for some time now using ESP8266 modules (and hopefully soon the odd ESP32 device) to control things with Node-Red on the Raspberry Pi acting as the central controller and in charge of mobile and serial…