I figured after a couple of horrendous days figuring out what was wrong with my ROMS, it was time for a morning’s relaxing. Some time ago I added I2c to the Home Control software but never actually got around to doing anything with it. The i2c parallel expansion modules I…
ESP SDK and RBoot Woes
Remember I did an article entitles Serial Woes? Well that’s been changed to serial success as we found bugs in tools and gained an understanding of the USB FTDI handshaking lines – which altogether led to improvements in the Node-Red Arduino node and a completely working solution for USB Serial…
NanoPi M2
More from FriendlyArm – this time the NanoPi M2. I’ve had this board running both Debian and Android – but first – a little about the boards. Like the M1 these are small – around 65mm by 60mm so much smaller than Raspberry Pi. They are also cheaper than the…
Raspberry Pi Node Red Serial Delight
Or – how to get USB serial ports working on the Raspberry Pi This originally was a cry for help – I wanted a second serial port on the Raspberry Pi AND I made the mistake of trying out Firmata on the Arduino at the same time – resulting collection…
Chip First Looks
Right now I’m finishing up my installation on the little CHIP board – only to find that WEBMIN would not work – and why is that? Well, the entire WEBMIN site down and also this morning – SOURCEFORGE website was down!!! it’s back up now and webmin is now…
Blog Fixes
Apologies if you’ve been checking the blog today and noticed it appear in a smorgasbord of colour. I’ve been trying to fix an issue with login and menus – and in the end, started from scratch. Hopefully now all is working well. This all started with a note to ask…
A Good Gadget Day
Today has been a good day. After a great Saturday down at Castril (waterfalls etc – fantastic weather) in Southern Spain, Aidan Ruff and I sat down with some wine to test his new movement sensor/smoke detector board. As is often the case, the first iteration has some issues but…
Home Control Updates
For those following the home control project including the ROMS for ESP8266, I’ve made several changes in the last few days including a new uptime command {uptime?} returning a string of the time since last reset/power-cycle. Also added that to the debug output – also fixed a couple of minor…
Lua Revisited
I like to revisit things I’ve looked at in the past just to see if anything has changed. And so it was that I went off to the NODEMCU site to take a look at how it is coming on. NodeMCU is software for the ESP8266 which runs an interpreted…
32Mb ESP01 and Sonoff
Some time ago I passed comment in here about converting an ESP-01 to 32Mb (or 4MB). And here it is in the flesh – a 32Mb ESP-01 – and also – at last – Sonoff Upgrades. Now, why would you want to do all of that? I would suggest only…
A5 V11 Router
Or – the cheapest router on the planet – probably. I should say at the outset this experiment did not end too well – currently waiting for another unit to arrive – but worth a read in case you’re about to embark on using this unit. I had to pick…
ESP8285 in the Flesh
Well, here it is – one of our readers kindly sent me chips to play with. So first things first – unless you have incredibly small hands there is no way to “play” with these with a soldering iron – but a reflow oven well that’s another matter. For anyone…
Christmas at Bedrock
Well it certainly feels like Christmas here at Bedrock (while I’m here, check out this unrelated item – the Ameba – looks interesting). I got up this morning to a large bag of post – including a new battery for Maureen’s Samsung laptop (though why I mention that in the…
Coming up..
Coming up in the next couple of weeks – the FriendlyArm M2 – how does it compare with the M1? ESP8285 – first look…. and the new Itead plug-in-the-wall WIFI switch. Meanwhile I’ve decided that if I keep trying to figure out why my FTDI won’t work properly in a…
Cheap Pi Screen
I have a Raspberry Pi 3 and recently bought a 5” screen from here at sub-£20: While the instructions on Ebay totally miss talking about the touch screen which does not work by default, this blog entry – https://blog.ask-a.ninja/?p=48 is absolutely bang on – the screen instructions are more precise…
Useless Pi Browser and Firefox
Why oh WHY do they keep that utterly USELESS Web browser in Raspbian? I powered up my new Raspberry Pi today on my new 5” LCD display and tried loading up Node-Red on the browser. That went well until I tried to edit a function – blank white window.…
A Brighter Node Red
Just today – an upgrade notice for Node-Red appeared in my in-box. Upgrade details are here. What is Node-Red? Details here – if you’re not using it or at least investigating it – you may be missing out. Now, the support guys (Google groups here) are VERY clear about required…
Cheap IOT Solution and the M1
Recently I blogged about an update to pricing for the Sonoff mains control units – now down to £3.50 ($4.85) and our readers even reminded us of some potentially great software for those units (as well as my own but then mine is more of a kitchen sink approach and…
Cheapest IOT on the Planet
You’ve seen me writing about SONOFF before, several times – and you’ll see it again – but today I’m writing about one thing (for now) – “MUCH CHEAPNESS” to quote a last-century holiday advert. I would be very much surprised if the Sonoff WIFI is NOT the cheapest WIFI mains…
Gear S2 Classic and Home Control
For a change from processor boards, let me tell you about my new WATCH. For a long time I’ve been a faithful Pebble user, the watch has a week’s battery life, a display you can read in sunlight and a host of applications. I had one of the very originals…