The ESP-12F seems to have appeared out of no-where. It appears to be nothing more than the ESP-12E – perhaps someone can enlighten us. It is cheap, no doubt about it at $2 inc. shipping or around what, £1.32 UK money? This things are now so cheap that the support…
Raspberry Pi Monster Script Part 2
Updated 10/10/2015: This won’t make sense without reading part 1 first. In the first of these articles I hopefully got you to the point of having basic access to your Pi2 from a PC – and actually running a simple script that says “Hello”. From there on it’s just a…
Raspberry Pi Monster Script Part 1
It all started innocently enough… Updated 10/10/2015: All I wanted to do was control some ESP8266 and Arduino boards – I spent hours looking at various packages and ultimately decided that none of them really did what I wanted – I resolved to learning about the Raspberry Pi (though frankly…
SQLite on the Pi
This weekend gone I was having a play with dSQLite for my Raspberry Pi2 and thanks to some helpful guys here in the comments section and at Node-Red Google forums – and a little inspiration of my own – I manage to get everything up and running – so I’ve…
QD Tech Displays on the ESP8266
I’ve seen a number of projects using an Arduino and an ESP8266 to drive LCD displays. You may know that my home control has used a 1284-based board (MEGA type) to run a nice Thermostat display for some time now. The displays look very pretty in the right box. THIS…
ESP8266 RAM
I recently put out a question about the RAM in the ESP8266. In a typical compile, for me I might see… Sections:Idx Name Size VMA LMA File off Algn0 .data 00000894 3ffe8000 3ffe8000 000000e0 2**4CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, DATA1 .rodata 0000275c 3ffe88a0 3ffe88a0 00000980 2**4CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, READONLY, DATA3 .bss 00009a80…
Backing up Node-Red
For anyone looking in for the first time – I have a home control system based around ESP8266 boards and the odd Arduino. They talk MQTT to a Raspberry Pi which acts as a central controller – using Node-Red – the greatest thing since sliced bread. I’m in the process…
Idling
In case anyone was thinking I’d fallen off a cliff.. I’m waiting for my Orange Pi PC to turn up so I can find out if it works of if the doubters are correct. In the meantime I’m working on my script to install everything but the kitchen sink –…
DiskStation Pi
Just in case you thought I’d gone off on holiday.. I’ve been sat at the terminal over the last couple of days, experimenting. You will have seen concerns mentioned here and elsewhere about using a Raspberry Pi as a central hub to control ESP8266s using MQTT and Node-Red. The issue…
BASIC for ESP8266
Don’t get me wrong, we don’t yet have a fully working interpreter, but a link appeared on my ESP8266WIFI Facebook page thanks to Michael Molinari this morning and I thought I’d give it a whirl. http://esp8266basic.com/ I grabbed the Windows loader (Windows 10 put up a SEVERE warning about this…
Raspberry Pi Run from USB
What a day… I decided this morning that I would run my Raspberry Pi (well one of them anyway) from USB for the following reasons: I have lots of tiny microSD cards and lots of USB sticks or USB adaptors for full size SD cards. And that’s all fine and…
RAMLOG and the mysteries of Linux
Just as I thought I was getting to grips with this – reality comes back to punch me in the teeth… I have 2 Raspberry Pis running Debian (latest 4.1 Linux version) and RAMLOG . In each case at 6.25 in the morning they restart RAMLOG (which for those who…
Javascript woes
Someone put me out of my misery… why doesn’t this work… var x=[];x[0]=255;x[1]=255;x[2]=0;var t=x[0].toString(16)+x[1].toString(16)+x[2].toString(16);alert(t);$(‘div’).attr(‘style’, ‘background:#’+t+’ !important’); I’m changing the colour of some panels… THIS works.. $(‘div’).attr(‘style’, ‘background:#ffff00 !important’); but THIS doesn’t $(‘div’).attr(‘style’, ‘background:#’+t+’ !important’); even though t=’ffff00’
RGB versus HSV
In implementing my own home control solution which you’ll find in this blog “home control 2015” the software has been and remains a work in progress – mainly because I keep finding bugs and adding new features. I’m fairly confident that most of the bugs that have plagued me over…
Nextion Displays and the ESP8266
So a parcel arrived for me this morning in the post. A Nextion display. And what is that, you may well ask? Think of something like a thermostat or really any home control situation, at some point you have to stop sending text commands from an expensive PC and reduce…
Driving me NUTS
This has been driving me mad and I’ve only just found the answer – thanks to some clues people have given me – but as many of the responses were wrong – you might well find this interesting. I have a an array of 180 bytes – for 60 serial…
More Websockets
In a previous blog item here I covered the use of MQTT, jQuery Mobile and Websockets to make a controller web page for mobile phones/tablets etc. here https://techspecialsdaily.store/mqttjquerywebsockets-controller/ I showed just a basic and not too pretty page with buttons that would control real items, in my case via Websockets…
Windows 10–the Missing bits
Slight diversion as I’ve just been upgrading my PCs to Windows 10 and a friend of mine pointed me to changes as against previous versions – i.e. what’s missing from Windows 10. Here I’ll take a look and give my comments. Firstly I should say as a hardware-oriented guy I…
MQTT/JQUERY/WEBSOCKETS Controller
I wrote a while ago about using web sockets as against something like NETIO for controlling the home – most folk liked the article but I think part of it was a little complicated – and at the time I’d not really thought it out to make it as simple…
Testing ESP8266 WIFI
Having had mixed results with both the ESP-Arduino environment and the normal SDK (1.3.0 with latest patch) and C, I decided this morning to up the game and do some focussed testing. So – I made a simple loop with ESP-Arduino, connecting to WIFI, connecting to MQTT and publishing a…