I am sick up to here with websites telling you “the best alternatives” while not allowing discussion – in other words, thinly disguised adverts. I’ve been a Skype user since long before Microsoft came along and ruined it. Recently we’ve been looking for FREE alternatives to the free Skype that…
Helpful Engineering Volunteers Against Covid-19
I’ve been asked today by Aidan Ruff – many of you will have come across the name of my friend and ex-business partner of many years as we work on projects together and so when he asked me to put a word in for a volunteer group called “Helpful Engineering”…
A Trip Down Memory Lane
Nothing beats virus-related-boredom like a trip down memory lane. This morning I got an email from Japan – specifically from game journalist Koji Fukuyama. Now, I get stuff in the mail all the time and I’m VERY wary of people asking questions out of the blue, not relating to the…
Teckin SP23 and SP27 Smart Plugs
In 2019 I wrote here (now updated) about the Teckin SP23 (for British plugs and sockets) Smart plugs and commented that whether this ends well or not will depend on the company. Well, they wrote back to me on Nov 4, 2019. It would seem they have binned power monitoring…
ZemiSmart Smart WiFi LED Table Lamp
This blog entry will be short as there is not much to this desk light. This ZemiSmart offering is controlleable by WIFI or locally, costs maybe £30 on Amazon and – why would you pay that for a desk light? Well, for one thing you have full control over colour…
Guudgo 21 LED and 47 LED External IP Cameras
I have in my hands two cameras called Guudgo – one has 21 LEDs and the other has 47 LEDs. For reasons well beyond me the 21 LED camera uses Android APP called “YCC365 Plus” while the 47 LED camera uses downloadable Android APP “V380 Pro” – there will no…
More Node-Red Dashboard Success
This is a blog entry from 2016 that I’ve just updated.. In an even earlier entry the subject of Node-Red Dashboard, you’ll see I can hide that top menu if needed (the blue menu is great on a phone – not much use on a thermostat)… and then I discovered…
Geekcreit 3.5″ LCD Touch Screen, Case and Pen Kit
Just a brief mention of the Geekcreit 3.5″ TFT LCD Touch Screen+Protective Case+ Touch Pen Kit for the Raspberry Pi – Banggood sent this to me a while ago – if you are planning to use an RPI3 and need a small screen this is a good an option as…
Cheaper Raspberry Pi 4 , New Flasher and More
Update: Raspberry Pi now has it’s own image downloader and flasher – https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ called “Raspberry Pi Imager” – Note separate links for Windows, MAC and Ubuntu respectively within the above – odd that they chose Ubuntu and not Debian – given that Raspbian is based on the latter – but…
A quiet refurbishing day
Recently I’ve been catching up on my backlog of reviews and you could be forgiven for thinking that’s what I generally do. Far from it, today I’ve had a quiet day refurbishing. A couple of weeks ago, in order to do some testing before sending some kit off to Spain,…
Owon ODP3033 Bench Triple Power Supply
Updated Feb 29, 2020: And why would anyone write about a power supply? Not the most interesting subject, but like many boring things such as backups, essential. I created a short video several weeks ago about the Owon P4603 – a single channel job of particular interest as it has…
AliExpress Sinilink WIFI USB Controller
Today’s project for the day is the ESP8285-based “Sinilink WIFI-USB Mobile Phone Remote Controller” (or Sonoff for USB” as others have called it) – which handles up to 5 amps and can use a USB connection of from 3.5 to 20v (I’ve only tested 5v). Later I will describe how…
Bakeey E70 Waterproof ECG, Blood Oxygen and BP Smartwatch
I’ve updated this blog entry about the Bakeey E70 IP68 Waterproof Wristband ECG+PPG Heart Rate Blood Oxygen Monitor Smart Watch (which looks lovely) as I think it deserves a second glance because it has now been on my wrist for 7 solid days and the battery is still at 68%.…
Raspberry Pi 4 and SSD – Miracles at Last?
I’ve just been watching a video by Andreas Speiss – and I agree with him, USB boot on the Raspberry Pi has taken FAR too long and we are NOT a tiny minority in favour of USB boot, contrary to comments in the Pi forums. The PI3 had USB2 boot…
Blitzwolf BW-HL2 Smart Watch
If like me, you are aware of Blitwolf (actually the name often takes me back to “Wolfensten”) you will probably think of battery packs or even WIFI-controlled power sockets or adaptors…. but here we have a . A classy looking job with “leather” look strap, default classical-looking analog watchface and…
Deerma VC20 Ultra Light Cordless Vacuum Cleaner
Ok, I know this isn’t strictly high tech – but I promised Maureen I’d get her a new vacuum from China and here it is – the This neat cordless vacuum just arrived, having been (almost) delivered at the start of January JUST after we went off to the USA…
Smoke Alarms, Door and Water Leakage Sensors for RF-Bridge
I recently wrote about the Sonoff RF-Bridge – a great device for transferring RF signals from various gadgets to WIFI – well, first things first, I put Tasmota on the RF-Bridge so now, using the free Tasmota Device Manager on it, I can receive information from devices and that gets…
Xiaomi Redme Note 8 Pro Smartphone
This updated blog entry is about the . Ever since Banggood sent off a Bakeey cover for the Redmi Note 8 Pro phone when all I had at the time was the original Note 8 (there IS a difference – both great phones at the price but this one starts…
Bakeey R16 Smart Watch
This is a quick writeup about the Bakeey R16 music control IPS screen smart watch with heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen monioring as well as the usual sports mode, sleep monitoring and more. It is a winner and I’ve no idea why I didn’t blog it when I received…
M5Stack Atom Lite ESP32 Development
Having received the from Banggood, I was faced with the choice of using the familiar Arduino programmig environment (very popular for ESP8266 and ESP32 programming) or the UIFlow environment. As I know NOTHING of the latter, I thought – WHY NOT – and so off I went into the deep…