If any of you have installed the new “Stretch” version of Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi, you may have noticed a slight issue with the wiringPi GPIO utility.
Roseapple Pi and Wiring Nirvana
Yes, you’ve heard it all now, we have Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, Nano Pi and… Roseapple Pi. A long time ago when I first wrote about this board, there was a price tag of $35 (I believe it was called the Lemon Pi – same board, different marketing – hence…
Ikea Solar Installation
Just a brief comment about solar panels in the UK and in particular, Ikea. Comments invited. Recently announced, Ikea in partnership with a company called Solarcentury are to sell solar panel kit. I feel I should say my piece and then let others come back to me….
Banana Pi Zero
Does this look familiar to you? I’ve not had a chance to test one of these but I thought it worth bringing the Banana Pi Zero to your attention and can make some preliminary comments..
The Sonoff B1
The Sonoff B1 is a “white and color” smart-bulb! Not a lot new here you might say – and certainly, many such bulbs exist. Shortly after I received this lamp back in 2017, I happened to be in Toledo in Spain at a major shopping centre at the Leroy Merlin…
Nano I2c Peripheral
My “nano peripheral” started life as a simple attempt to expand the ESP8266 by making use of the IO on a really cheap Chinese board, an Arduino Nano equivalent Chinese £1.20 rip-off (After all, any Arduino is basically little more than an Atmel chip with reset and power circuitry and…
A new GPIO in Town
Since I started reviewing different boards (i.e. those other than the Raspberry Pi), one thing that has always stood out a mile has been lack of GPIO support. Well, that’s now history – at least for Node-Red users. I cannot being to express how sick and tired I am of…
Khadas Vim
A little something arrived via Correos post for me recently… a very pretty little package containing a Khadas Vim. What is that, you may well ask. Well, until recently I’d not heard of them either. I can’t remember if one of you good readers brought them to my attention or…
The Real Raspberry Pi
I’ve been using the likes of FriendlyArm boards and similar for so long now, struggling at first with GPIO and I2c and as regular readers will know, finally pretty much mastering it due to hard research and more importantly, the works of people you’ll find links to in other articles…
Arduino Cores
Just a quick one…. for some time until I discovered the ESP8266 and the Espressif SDK which I use today, I was an Arduino fan and one of the more annoying aspects was the lack of support for all but the mainstream units – Atmega328, 2560 etc. One particularly nice…
The TOMO Power Supply
Well, I started to make a video of this thinking it was going to be a great new uninterruptable supply. I’d listened to others, I’d read the spec (or so I thought) and this was to be the new saviour of battery supplies. The TOMO unit comes in different sizes,…
I2C For Everyone
There was a time in the distant past (in my case this morning) when running I2c natively in Node-Red on anything other than a genuine Raspberry Pi was a nightmare. Not any more. So in a recent blog I’ve covered a pair of Node-Red nodes which allow GPIO access in…
Thermostat
As you do I just happened to be looking through the latest NODE offerings for Node-Red and spotted this little number – a thermostat node. Now I have my own controls for this and I’m happy with them but they’re generally done with code – and I saw this –…
SSD1306 on the NEO Plus2
You might recall some time ago I wrote about using Python on the Orange Pi Zero etc to run the little SSD1306-based displays. Despite that being successful I did have a nagging doubt about the LUMA library because later on – when doing some apt-get upgrades I got a segmentation…
NanoPi Neo PLUS2
No, I’d not heard of this one either until a couple of weeks ago. With a small form factor, 2 USB sockets and a $25 price tag it has to be worth a second glance. I’ve used the NEO and this is definitely an improvement – H5 processor, the Ethernet…
The Script Step By Step
I thought it might be useful for beginners to go through the installation of Raspberry Pi 2 Jessie (July 2017) and “the script” – so here goes… I’m also doing this to help a friend who had issues installing the script on a Pi late last night, most likely due…
Simple Scope
You may have noticed that I’ve been working on my ESP8266 home control software (see the updates elsewhere along with new diagram), specifically upgrading and adding to the number of OLED and LCD displays I can handle, either by I2c or SPI. I’ve been doing a lot of optimising and…
Icons
In case you were wondering – no, I’ve not gone off the boil, I’ve been quietly beavering away on my ESP8266 code since deciding to abandon the old ESP-01 and adding fonts for displays. Right now I’m focussing on the QD-Tech boards – 120×160 but I’ll eventually migrate the use…
The Sonoff 4CH Pro
The 4-channel Sonoff 4CH Pro is a new product from ITEAD, available from them directly or from Amazon in the UK– though you might reasonably question why the UK Amazon price is higher in pounds than the original is in dollars. Essentially the unit is a development of their earlier…
NanoPi M3
This is a July 2017 update to the blog entry about the FriendlyArm NanoPi M3 board. Smaller than a Raspberry Pi but with a boat-load of facilities, the board includes: A3 Octa-Core processor (handy for multimedia) S5P6818 1GB Ram 3.5mm audio jack 1GBPS Ethernet port WIFI Bluetooth MicroUSB for power…