The DSO338 pocket size scope turned up for me this morning and a lovely little job it is. I don’t think I’ll be ditching my 4-channel XDS3104E Owon scope but for Arduino and such like, this should do the job nicely, especially when I’m travelling as it has a built-in…
The Thermostat revisited
Remember this? I put this Node-Red Dashboard (+ images) stat together January 2017 then promptly forgot about it – thank heavens I blogged the lot, having recently moved home. I find I need a thermostat for our home and yesterday I was in the process of re-inventing the wheel when…
HoldPeak HP-770D Multimeter
January 2019 – Update – was I just unlucky or have others come across this? I just found that the clever yellow blinds which stop you putting the leads in the wong holes stopped working – then I discovere that the main control wheel had a loose bearing. In the…
Koogeek FG5 Bluetooth Smart Massager
Some weeks ago when we were still in Spain I got a call to say my new Koogeek Bluetooth massager was on it’s way. Well, it never turned up and I forgot all about it, so imagine our surprise today when we opened the mail to find an unexpected set…
Fingertip Pulse Oximeter (most likely Banggood or AliExpress)
Here’s something you might find useful if you are interested in your pulse and blood oxygen levels (and don’t have a suitably equipped smart bracelet). For under £12 sterling, this handy device (Gearbest link removed as they are now defunct – Sept 2021) might just do the trick. Simply pop…
DIN Rail Current and Voltage Meter
I just received one of these DIN-rail units from GearBest – and the price isn’t bad at £7.73 (sterling)… inc free shipping to the UK. https://goo.gl/aQYcqU At first I could not understand how they managed with two wires. Simple really. A pair of connections take in mains power (for the…
The Wall Display
This blog has been updated as I’ve discovered that these displays are, after all, still freely available from AliExpress. I’ve recently spent time working on my hallway wall display, an amount of time which would be considered commercial suicide. Good job it isn’t commercial. Of course I’ve not just been…
The Death of S6D02A1 Displays?
That title as it happens was a bit premature. Those of you who have been following this blog for sometime will know that the ESP-GO project supports, amongst others, little LCD displays based around the S6D02A1 chip – and has done from the beginning. This VERY inexpensive display is full…
DANIU A99 2MP USB/microUSB Boroscope
Here’s the full item description as supplied by Banggood. DANIU A99 720P 2MP Tube Camera — https://goo.gl/njddmw Good toy. In order to use it with Windows, you need to download www.kkmoon.com/pc.rar and for Android: www.kkmoon.com/an99.apk Except when you don’t. In my case, the USB/microUSB interface is no good for my…
Raspberry Pi GPIO Zero
For simple (and not so simple) IO control on the Pi without worrying about access control and SUDO etc. all of which can get in the way of having fun, you can use the GPIO Zero library and API – rather than go into detail I’ll refer you to the…
Raspberry Pi Pin Layout
There I was, messing about with GPIO pins on my Raspberry Pi 3 B+ recently and as usual could not remember the pin numbers. I stumbled on this image below – thanks to @pinout for this handy Raspberry Pi connector layout (see link to Raspberry Pi site further down) and…
FriendlyArm NanoPi M4
Yesterday in the post came the singularly impressive-looking NanoPi M4 unit complete with supplied eMMC for Android 8 and 16GB uSD for Lubuntu Desktop and the most spectacular heat-sink I’ve ever seen, not to mention (oh, go on then, if you insist) , a tiny Apple-reminiscent mains power supply able…
Web servers and SQLITE Editors Rethink
For some considerable time now I’ve been using Apache (web server) on my various SBCs to present a basic web page, run PHPLITEADMIN (local SLQLite Database Manager and do other menial jobs. A LONG time ago I got rid of MySQL (which I had used on and off along with…
Easy Backup 2
Having satisfied myself that RPI-CLONE does a good job of creating backups of Raspberry Pi (no guarantees you won’t lose data but it hasn’t happened to me yet) I started the search for a solution for other boards. I find the Orange Pi +2E to be a particularly nice piece…
Web Editor for SQLITE
I received a potentially nice tip from Mr Shark today – a web editor for SQLITE (as against PHPLITEADMIN which is not Web based and uses PHP). Beware I found some kind of timeout, the author agreed this was likely some kind of timeout, then closed the issue on Github…
Easy Backups and Webmin
This article started off as two separate subjects – and has now gone SO much further – you really need to read this one… So I’m messing here with a NanoPi NEO PLUS2 (though this applies to other board too) – and I’ve had all sorts of issues getting SSD1306…
Xiaomi Roidmi 3S Bluetooth Music Car Charger
This Xiaomi Roidmi 3S cigarette-lighter-sized Bluetooth transmitter and car charger has two USB outputs totalling 2.4 amps output AND is able to talk via Bluetooth to your mobile phone so that those without Bluetooth on the car radio can tune into a special low power FM transmission and play their…
Node Red Initialisation
This is a post from back in March 2017 – but as I’d forgotten all about it, I thought you might like to share my renewed enthusiasm if you are a Node-Red user. NR introduces non-volatile flow and global variables in version 0.19 but if that doesn’t work for you,…
Xiaomi Mi Band 3 Smart Bracelet
Last month, the mailbag brought a number of goodies including a new smart wrist band for Maureen, the Xiaomi MI Band 3, supplied by GearBest. Several weeks later, this little fitness band is in full time use, as Maureen absolutely loves it. The battery lasts a week or more between…
SD CARD Backup
Update September 2018 I read about the most convoluted ways to back up SBC systems…. some back up only data, some use arcane commands to do the job – few if any are a single click job for a complete backup that can even handle larger or smaller SDs. That…