To give it the full title, this entry is about the Alfawise T9 Body Fat Fitness Tracker (or Smart Bracelet). With a 0.96 inch screen, the T9 uses an App (Android or IOS) called Gloryfit (I use the Android version from the Playstore). The bracelet uses an NRF52832 CPU and…
Category: General
Charger Doctor
No doubt you’ve seen ads for the little “Charger Doctor” gadget from China – well, my advice is to avoid it like the plague. I have two of them, I’ve used them in the past but never on a Raspberry Pi. It turns out that given a 5.2v input, one…
Samsung Galaxy and Gear Watches
So the latest is that the new Gear 4 watch won’t be called that at all, just Samsung Galaxy watch – and for anyone who has been living in a cave for some time(I have, but a cave with WIFI) can there be any doubt that this is the best…
The Umidigi F1 Smartphone
Updated June 14, 2019: So many phones out there, so much choice, so much rubbish. When it came to updating my own phone last year, I took advice from my friend Antonio (Mr Shark) and went for the Xiaomi Pocophone F1 and as it turns out, it was good advice…
Sonoff S26 Wifi Smart Plug
You may well have seen plenty of reviews and adverts for the Sonoff S26 WiFi Smart plug so I won’t go into too much technical detail here other than to say this VERY inexpensive wall socket can easily be re-flashed to run alternative software for those not to keen on…
ESP GO update and more
A minor update for ESP-GO – still working on the Espressif SDK 3.1 version as RBOOT is still not OTA-ing reliably (everything else does)– but the SDK 2.1 version is working a treat – very reliable. There WAS an issue due to some recent updates, with the web setup –…
Blog changes
In order to minimise spam, I have removes some email subscriptions where the user names looked automated. This process is nowhere near perfect but is essential to protect valid readers/subscribers. I’ve also changed email newsletter requests to double-opt-in – that is, if you newly request emails from the blog, you…
EleksMaker Pro Laser Engraver
Update February 28, 2019 Last year year I put together this excellent A3 laser engraving machine. Originally, a 500mW laser module arrived complete with its own power supply (the laser which was not included in the basic kit). It turns out that was the wrong laser and now I have…
BigTimer and getMoonTimes
I just spent ages debugging issue with theSunCalc module used in Node-Red-Contrib–BigTimer. It turns out that the getMoonTimes module doesn’t seem to handle the alwaysUp and alwaysDown methods the way one might expected – these do not return FALSE if not TRUE – they return undefined – that took some…
Devices recently connected to the network
Can I give the Raspberry Pi any MORE to do? This started off as a plea for help – as I could not find a way to get reliable reporting of changed devices on my network – as you’ll see, now CRACKED thanks to readers and in particular Mr Shark.…
Espressif ESP-EYE Board
I remember reading, less than a month ago, a blog entry called “The Mysterious ESP-EYE” in which it is stated that there is no information on the Espressif site on this interesting little camera module. Well, I’ll correct that – there most certainly is now and here’s the link. https://www.espressif.com/en/products/hardware/esp-eye/overview…
Phone Charging Epiphany 2
Some time ago after using USB chargers (and USB battery units) since late last century and having been constantly disappointed by their performance when charging phones, I started to get very selective. At the risk of boring experts in here, a short history… The first change I started to make…
The A5X MAX Android 8.1 TV Box
Regular viewers may recall I reviewed a rather nice TV Android box some time ago – the H96 Max Plus. I’m particularly choosy about these units, again regular readers will know that I’ve used and tested a number of mini-board level products such as various NanoPC boards and others for…
Sonoff, Tasmota and Alexa
I always think it is worth periodically re-visiting things you’ve tried before, even when the first attempt led to tears. Things change. And so it was that I pulled out and old (original 4-pin connector) Sonoff Basic recently and gave Tasmota a go. It is some time since I looked…
Geekcreit Large Rainbow Clock Kit
If you know me, you know I’m a sucker for pretty colours, which is why I had to have this Geekcreit Large Size Rainbow Colour Clock DIY kit. I kind of glossed over the kit bit when looking at it, but never mind, I’m up for a challenge (and if…
Raspberry Pi RPI-CLONE Issues
As I normally rave about RPI-CLONE – I thought I’d share the dirty laundry this time. ** Update Jan 13 2019 It seems pretty obvious in hind-sight that the issues I was having below were power supply related and one bad SD card. I’ve just finished my 7th successful backup-clone…
USB DVR
This promising looking 1080P FHD Auto DVR Camera Video recorder with WiFi ADAS G-Sensor from TomTop will apparently work in the car to take videos (rear or front) and store them on a (not supplied) SD card. I installed an SD I had lying around and plugged the USB-powered camera…
Eachen WiFi IR Universal Remote
First reviews of 2019 coming up… starting with the Eachen WIFI-IR Universal Remote (touted as Sonoff but it isn’t Sonoff). This inexpensive unit needs USB power to run and comes with it’s own microUSB cable – the assumption being that you have spare USB supplied lying around (not a good…
Bakeey NY01 HR Monitor Smart Watch
The Bakeey NY01 HR Monitor Smart Watch is looking good up to now – nice, solid looking, big display, single real touch button on the side so no fingerprints on the screen. 1.3” display, matt black, 3 decent main time displays with calendar and other info all in one place,…
Lenovo HF03X SmartBand
I picked the HF03X from Gearbest because it seems to have all the right features in a smartwatch/smartband at a reasonable price. Colour, decent battery charge life, pulse, blood pressure, oxygen levels, sleep, sport, notifications, alarm etc. The last watch from GearBest was the Xiaomi Mi 3 – lovely, gets…