And now including – the MONSTER version. Just a short while ago, I just bought this 16750maH USB battery unit (charger) with no prior knowledge of the company – on the recommendation of my pal Aidan who does our PCBs for Esp8266. I have a specific requirement – which many…
Coming up this week
Coming up, reviews of FriendlyArm’s latest offerings – the NanoPC-T3 and the little M1. I’ll cover both of these later in the week with testing etc.. but for now a taster of the more powerful unit. You may recall I have the older NanoPC-T2 running Debian as user PI –…
Anonymous
Just a quick note folks for anyone new looking in. I’ve had some emails in recently which were generally just links with no explanation – and usually the word anonymous or similar was in the email address. For the sake of clarity, I have to approve all new incoming emails…
ESP8266 and Nextion Updates
This one will be on-going.. so the plan was to write a blog about the latest version of our little ESP-12 board and it working with the new Nextion display board. But as happens in life from time to time, it all went wrong at the Nextion end. However… Our…
FriendlyArm NanoPC T2
You may recall some time ago I did a review of the FriendlyArm NanoPi 2, a very nice little SBC indeed, here is the review, but of course time moves on and the Raspberry Pi 3, Banana Pi 3 and others have reached the shops, raising the bar and our…
Geolocated Augmented Reality
I don’t normally do links based on incoming mail but I spotted this request from Gary Baker in my inbox this morning – a proposal for a project – and actually it looks quite interesting so I’m passing it on. See for yourself.. http://gary-baker.blogspot.com.es/2016/06/geolocated-augmented-reality-project.html – reply directly to Gary if…
Samba on Raspberry Pi
This brief article should help Raspberry Pi users who like me are merely dabbling in Linux but generally use Windows machines. Sick of accessing your Raspberry Pi (or Pis) by IP address? Here’s a solution. I’ve used Samba before with mixed success. I don’t even want to access Pi files…
Talking ImperiHome
I just added another useful tool to the home control arsenal – speech – not on the PC but on my phone. As regular readers know I use ImperiHome a lot – talking directly to Node-Red to control stuff – and that’s fine – it works – it’s not the…
Background Beavering
You could be forgiven for thinking I’ve gone off the boil as I’ve not written much in here this week… far from it in fact. This week I’ve been working on my ImperiHome setup and the new Raspberry Pi software. ImperiHome: In case you don’t know, ImperiHome is an app…
Ivona Again
A recurring theme in software development is re-inventing the wheel because you don’t know about or don’t understand what is available already. Well, sometimes it is for me anyway. And so it was that my PERFECTLY working, well appreciated but totally un-necessary workflow for Ivona speech on the Node-Red –…
BeagleBone Green Wireless
The BeagleBone Green Wireless is the result of a joint effort between Seeed Studio and Beaglebone.org. It is based on the open-source hardware of the Beaglebone Black and they’ve added 2 Grove connectors. You might recall I did a blog on the Grove stuff a while back – basically the…
Basic for Arduino
I just had this pointed out to me – https://www.b4x.com/b4r.html – it looks like it is free for the full version!! Anyone tried this? Any thoughts?
New PCB
After a slight hiccup with the new board (LED track missing) here’s the new board – link for PCB here – as you can see, Aidan has made several improvements – smaller buttons, connector for DHT22 etc, markings for I2c (right now I only have support for the 8-output expander…
Raspberry Pi Backups
Backups the easy way One of my biggest issues with the Pi has always been – backups. Using a PC to backup a 16GB SD is a pain and of course necessitates turning the Pi off to remove the SD. Well, now there’s a better way. A slightly less painful…
BMP280 for HC 2018
I have just added a working BMP280 implementation into the Home Control 2018 code (see right menu in blog) returning temperature and pressure. Add that to the (already implemented) BME280 code, Seeed display, 16,channel PWM, port expansion and more, it’s not been a bad development week really! Manual updated. The…
Speech … the Final Frontier
Updated 02/01/2017 Buffered, SD-cached high-quality human-like speech working alongside sound effects for your IOT project. Requirements: Raspberry Pi or similar with audio out, Node-Red and a little of your time. But you don’t need this blog – there’s a WAY better way to do this – in my latest entry…
Remote checking Home Control Units
Those of you who are aware of the Home Control project (Home Control 2019) will know that the software/hardware combination of a Raspberry Pi (running Jessie, Node-Red, SQLite and Mosquitto) and ESP12 (running the software described in the Home Control project) is proving very reliable – but there are occasions…
Home Control and Nextion Updates
Just a brief update. Thanks to some feedback I was prompted to see if it is possible in the home control project to get feedback as to the state of an output on the same line as controlling it. So for payloads you might use {out12:1} to turn on GPIO12…
Special UK quality
Is it just me or do others find this kind of thing annoying? I thought it might be a good idea to get a PCF8574T I2C I/O expander as a little add-on to the home control system, so you could plug it into, say GPIO4 and GPIO5, losing 2 outputs…
The Electrodragon Alternative
Part 1: At $6, the Electrodragon “WIFI IOT Relay Board based on ESP8266” looks like a force to be reckoned with, offering WIFI control over two 10 amp relays. But what about the SONOFF from ITEAD? How do they compare? Making use of their own incredibly cheap power supply…