If you are into home control, then unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve almost certainly heard of Sonoff – Sonoff BASIC is their cheap power controller… recently upgraded to R3. Well, until October 31, Banggood have a VERY special price on the R2. I’ve been using these for…
ESPURNA and SONOFFS
After using many packages to control Itead Sonoffs and even enjoying success with Tasmota which has Alexa compatibility, I’ve recently had a very favourable, exciting, even) experience with Xose Perez’s multi-purpose Espurna IOT firmware on some of my Sonoff power controllers. On the subject of Amazon Alexa, SOME of my…
Feeltech 6900 Signal Generator
You may have seen a recent comment from Peter Tennenbaum in my FY6800 review from last year. His success at obtaining English documentation prompted me to get in touch with the company, the upshot being that the new FY6900 model has just arrived and looking remarkably like the FY6800. I…
Node-Red 1.0 b3 Trials
This one is only for Raspberry Pi / Node-Red fans. ALL SORTED – everything works – so this is here merely to help others and maybe to encourage a better setup for I2C, RPI GPIO in Node-Red 1.0 official, serial and SQLITE3? Here’s a thing – don’t even THINK about…
Node-Red Persistence
How could I POSSIBLY be so SLOW? For many months, after originally coming up with my own mechanism for making Node-Red variables persistent across power cycling – and then promptly forgetting about it, I’ve been conveniently ignoring the relatively new official way to do this… This morning, just out of…
RPI4 Network Lesson
This blog entry was last updated mid-September 2019 and covers a wide range of issues I’ve had and resolved since the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer (SBC) and the “Buster” update to the (Linux Debian-based) Raspbian operating system, in particular in setting up the networking and hostname…
Photo Apps
It just occurred to me that the sub-title of my tech blog infers anything to do with gadgets – and most sunny summer days I find time to take photos, usually of gadgets but also of friends, scenery and local events. I do have a blog for photography – a…
Shelly One WIFI Switch
“Shelly One” is just one example of several (claimed open source) products produced by a company called Shelly who are based, not as you might expect in China’s mega technology city of Shenzhen but in Sofia, Bulgaria. Shelly are not new and there are plenty of videos out there about…
Sonoff BasicR3 10A
I’m currently blogging about the more expensive 16A Shelly One power controller and already this summer I’ve written about the Gosund units, but regular readers will be aware that I’m a long-term fan of Sonoff and their various low cost controllers. My most recent acquisition is a pair of Sonoff…
Cubot X19 Budget Phone
Updated August 17 2019: The Cubot X19 smartphone arrived back in May, well packaged, complete with USB charger and lead (the ad describes charging as Type-C fast charge and with its own charger it does charge quite quickly) and the first thing that came to my wife’s attention was the…
Gosund Smart Sockets
A pair of Gosund SP1 16A (i.w. 16 amps) Smart sockets turned up for me today. These German smart sockets plug into your mains power outlet and allow you to control the output either locally or remotely by a variety of means. Now, first off the bat these are not…
MobaXterm Pro
Some time ago, William Taur of Mobatek sent me the latest Pro version of their MobaXterm product, and very nice it is. Mostly in the past I used the excellent WinSCP but then I started using the free version of MobaXterm with great success. Excellent as it is, if you…
Huawei Honor Band 4
In this morning’s post the Honor Band 4 Smartband – and lovely it is too. It has a little USB charge lead that connects to the band and hooks to any USB supply. Sitting in the garden I just happened to have my sadly-no-longer-sold-by-Currys Mixx Charge Power Bank – and…
Watchmen Solar Powered WIFI IP Camera YN88
My original ESCAM solar camera arrived In July from Banggood (links below) – marked as ESCAM Model YN88-WIFI-130W and with the simple name “Solar Camera”. Much more on that lower down but first – here is it’s replacement – the “Watchmen” Solar WIFI Camera and what a beauty (note I…
Bakeey Watchstraps for Xiaomi Mi 3/4
These watchstraps are pretty and more importantly CHEAP. One of the great things about the Xiaomi Mi 3 and 4 bands is that they are just a simple black module and there are loads of replacement straps out there for them. I like the lime green one personally but at…
NGINX and Reverse Proxy
Mr Shark recently wrote a comment which I believe warrants it’s own blog entry, so see below (update August 7, 2019). Despite still showing Apache in “the script”, I have replaced Apache with Nginx with success and so has Mr Shark (Antonio) so feel free to use this separate script…
RPi-Clone with RPi Buster and beyond
See the later blog entry about RPi-4 and Buster as issues I had here have been resolved. No doubt there are many of you out there with Raspberry Pi single-board Computers who have for some time, like me been using “rpi-clone” to successfully clone/backup their Pi to known good SDs…
Dock Dock!
I’m not really sure what to make of this one though it is starting to grow on me. A Paris-based start-up company with website www.dockdock.io just sent me a sample of their new product. The slogan on their website is “Make Your Tablet Great Again!”. What you get for €28…
Bakeey H8 Blood Pressure Diamond Bracelet
Ok, so it isn’t real diamond, but the Bakeey H8 Blood Pressure Stainless Bracelet does a good job of looking the part for an inexpensive band. My wife has a nice Mi3 watch – good battery life but a tad boring and like most of these cheap bands, it is…
RabbitMQ MQTT Broker
Here’s a guest post by my close friend and collaborator Aidan Ruff. You’ll usually find him talking about his solar home in Spain or the kind of IOT stuff I do, in this instance, where I swear by Mosquitto MQTT and am currently looking at the even easier-to-install Node-Red-Contrib-Aedes (zero…