Here we started a conversation about SD Lifespan. How can we make our SBC projects run for longer? In comments I’ve seen elsewhere, people seem to think it is OK that a Pi may well fail within a year due to SD – I don’t think that is even REMOTELY…
Category: General
Newcastle Maker Faire
What a great day. Newcastle has an annual Maker Faire and it is on this weekend – and what a faire it is. I headed off first thing to get some parking and was pleased to find that Newcastle College had some cheap parking – £4 for the day. I…
Android Phone as Resource
This is the following up the previous Android Phone as Server article. Last update 22/03/2017. Servers: So having now tried various phones and tablets, it does look like the Linux Deploy App on a rooted Android phone makes for a good Debian installation in order to run software like Apache,…
Raspberry Pi Zero WiFi
I should have just entitled this “Raspberry Pi” as it keeps expanding (now covering the rest of the Pi boards – but keep reading).. as you will see, the title is a little restrictive given what we’ve done over the last few days. Friend Antonio over Italy and I (still…
Odds and Ends
Just a few odds and ends… we’ve arrived safely in Spain and I’m not getting quite as much blogging time as I’d like as there are repair jobs to do – but I managed a little item on Node-Red earlier – I’ve had people in here asking for simple-use examples…
The Mint Experiment
Anyone who’s known me for years knows I’m a died in the wool Windows man. Over many years from Windows 3.1 onwards, I’ve done down that road until ultimately all my machines are now Windows 10 – and I have to say that, while it could be argued before Windows…
RGraph with Node-Red
Having gone from spending countless hours staring at HTML5 CANVAS, I’m now at the “meh” stage as it starts to dawn on my how it works. And so it was that I stumbled on RGraph – or put another way, Christmas for widget-lovers. If you’ve been following these blog entries…
The Pine 64
Just a quicky this morning as I’m busy working on a LED for the thermostat control (thanks to some help from the author – I’m quite excited) as well as bench-testing some NanoPi 64 and M3 units. So what you see here is the Pine 64 – which, like the…
Some Background
Far too often in blogs like this we “assume” that everyone is following along, so for the sake of boring regular readers…. the background to much of what you will see in this blog, revolves around my home control project which started off using an Atmega1284 chip as a controller…
Happy New Year 6200+ members
And only days after I wrote that, we’re well over 6,200 of you, registered in here and climbing! Thanks to everyone and especially those who’ve submitted great feedback over the last year. (Update June 2017: That figure is now approaching 7,500!) A quiet New Year’s Eve – out with friends…
Merry Christmas
Some of you may be heading off home to see family so we might not hear from you for a little while. Others will be settling down at home for a Christmas of gadgets… Either way, by Christmas there’s a good chance there will be 6,000 of you signed up…
More Dashboard Goodness
Last week, I got as far as some new buttons on Node-Red Dashboard along with fancy colour change and vibrate – you’ll see some new buttons if you head off back to that entry. So, what’s those round things with numbers in them? No, not more gauges – but CONTROLS…
The Script (Original Article)
It occurs to me that I regularly refer to my “script” – without ever having detailed what it does! I’ll fix that now. The “script” is something Aidan and I originally put together for our own use, mainly to help when running home control systems – to simplify Debian Jessie…
Yule Be Impressed
Or not – as the case may be. This is my attempt to revive an old, bust Christmas decoration. The original Christmas candle decoration was a white casing, simply filled with static, old-school filament lighting – and as happens one of them went by the by. We don’t keep spares…
New This Weekend
Over the weekend I have added a new MENU item to the blog – COMMENTS – thanks to MrShark for that idea. Menu top right. The page shows the last 100 comments which will hopefully be useful. I’ve also added an experimental e-newsletter (again on request, several people said they’d…
How Not To Do PCBs
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…
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,…
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…