For those used to seeing me rant about micro-controllers this may seem a little odd, but I thought I’d drop this in here as a diversion to give others the benefit of my experience as IT Chairman of a fairly large national organisation. About 14 years ago the organisation decided…
Using GroveStreams
No sooner did I finish the blog on my new GroveStreams Node than I was faced with the question “how do I use GroveStreams?” Well, that’s generally up to you – but I will start you off on how I use GroveStreams – and the ridiculously simple setup (once you…
A GroveStreams Node Red Node
One of the more obvious things to do with a home control system is to capture information like temperature and humidity – and to graph it. For example I spent part of my time in the UK and part of it in Spain. When I’m not in Spain it is…
To GIT – or Not to GIT
For years I’ve been using DropBox on my various Windows PCs to make shared file access easy… and at work, my PA and I have shared DropBox folders for just as long. And that’s fine for lots of things, it certainly makes access when on location easy, but it is…
Lots of Users
I was just looking at the stats for the blog and in the short time this new version has been up and running I’ve something like 1300 subscribers – which is nice – but only a small percentage talk to us! So – obviously you’re here because you are into…
ReadyNas Duo Power Up Revitalised
I have had a NetGear ReadyNas Duo lying around for longer than I care to imagine… not because it is slow (and it is). not because I have something better (I do) but because for some reason well beyond my understanding the designer, when putting it together never wondered “what…
Freebies
So – would you like to play with Node-Red for free without even running it on your own PC? Check out FRED for Node-Red on Google . You just don’t get any easier than this! Also this morning I stumbled across KODING – an online environment for HTML, PHP, PYTHON etc. …
Notepad++ for Arduino
Anyone tried the Arduino Notepad plugin yet? Essentially lets you use Notepad++ to edit your Arduino files while in the Arduino environment – with syntax highlighting etc… looks like a good idea to me.
Raspberry Pi Processor Monitoring Widget
Don’t you just love it when people produce really useful tools for free!! And so it was that I got up early this morning to get a little Arduino/ESP-01 research done and got side-tracked by Google+ And the result – this baby. This is a tiny piece of software that…
The Oak by DigiStump
One of our readers has rightly pointed me to this new Kickstarter project – The Oak by Digistump (http://digistump.com/oak/) which has a number of things going for it – potential approval, secure WIFI interfacing and programming and Arduino compatibility. Indeed it is hard to fault this device other than when…
In a Far Distance Galaxy
A long, long time ago in a far distant…well, world, when I was pretty much using Arduinos for everything, the ESP-01 came along and my friend and colleague Aidan made a little board to handle a relay, an LCD display and.. an ESP-01. At the time we had no use…
External Drive for Pi2
I’ve read many articles about serious use of the Raspberry Pi and I’m now convinced that there is very little chance of mounting a Pi in a cupboard with MSQL and other write-intense programs – and expecting it seriously to last for a year or 3 because of the limited…
Web Sockets Web Page Part 3
For this to make sense you should look at Websockets Web Page Part 1 and Websockets Web Page Part 2 first. In this final section I add styling to the page and also change the code so that you can send a partial message i.e. {“my_input”:”Hello”} without affecting other parts…
Web Sockets Web Page Part 2
For this to make sense, you really should read the original websockets item first (which has just been updated)– as this is a follow up. So now, having made my first web sockets web page I started to wonder about the mechanics of getting information out of the page –…
A Node-Red Websockets Web Page
Updated 26/04/2015 I’ve been after this ever since I discovered Node-Red.. and right up until this yesterday I was tearing my hair out – having settled for NETIO as my interface of choice and constantly being annoyed by the slow pace of progress with this interface. So what is this…
A guide to reviews
I’ve had a number of requests to do reviews on the blog recently… so if anyone is looking in with this in mind, please note I’m only happy to review items that are of interest to the readers here. A quick look around the blog should give you an idea…
The Saturday Catch
While working on my Raspberry Pi image (with everything I need stored in an image so it it all goes to hell I can recover everything) I realised something I was missing on the Pi was a package manager. A graphical APT-GET for those who are not too keen on…
The Raspberry Pi SD Wear Issue
Reading around the web it is easy to see that SD memory and lifespan are very poorly understood. There are conflicting explanations of lifespan, there are solutions which don’t work because someone didn’t actually test them before writing up … what a mess. So here’s the deal. SD memory (the…
ESP8266 Test Board
I mentioned that Espressif were kind enough to send me a test board to play with – and very nice too. Not had time yet as I’m struggling with learning how to make an installer for my Node-Red package – with some great help from the guys involved with this….…
Slimmer Raspberry Pi 2
In the process this week of producing a new new Raspberry Pi2 with just the stuff I needed on it I thought I’d have a go at removing unnecessary programs from the Pi – that is the ones that come with it – after all the Debian installation from the…