Some time ago I wrote about the Sonoff inexpensive Zigbee dongle and various Zigbee hubs etc. At the time I was experimenting with HA (Home Assistant) and a load of other new things and didn’t really give Zigbee the attention it deserved. I’ve now come back to this with a…
GL-iNET Puli 4G LTE Wireless Router GL-XE300
The Puli (GL-XE300 “Industrial Grade” Wireless Router) is the latest in a long line of routers from GL-iNET – many of you may associate GL-iNET with the tiny, inexpensive Mango range of on-the-road routers (my first introduction to GL-iNET). Well, things have come a long way since then. (no comments…
The Genius Artillery 3D Printer – Amazing
I’ve been continually putting off assembling this Genius printer because I’ve assembled 3D printers in the past and what a nightmare they can be unless you have a workshop with plenty of space. At last, this morning I dug up the courage to open the box and checked out the…
70mai Midrive TP03 12V Portable Car Tyre Inflator
Ok, I’ll grant you, not very high-tech – but when I got the opportunity to get one of these to test back in late 2020, I happily jumped at the opportunity as I don’t trust the tyre pressure inflators (British spelling) in the few garages out here in the wilds…
Ortur Laser Master 2 Pro
This is about the Ortur Laser Master 2 Pro laser engraver with fixed focus 20W (input) laser, shipped to me by madethebest.com – important specs include the ability to engrave wood board, paper board, black acrylic, leather, food, stainless steel, powder coated metal and more with claimed cutting ability including…
Solar Acrylic Solar Lamps – the Horse – or the Owl?
I made a big deal out of these back in February, but one of my solar lights has given up due to internal corrosion (unusually wet winter/early spring) so I sent off for a replacement “Solar Acrylic LED Lawn Lamp” – we had a pair of owls in the garden…
Xiaomi Mijia 1S Vacuum Part 2 – the Spares
I’m not going to say any more about my superb point-scoring-with-the-wife Xiaomi (prounounced something like JAOOMEE with a soft J) Smart AI vacuum – but of course with any such gadget, no matter how good it is, there is always the question of spares (example – bargains back in the…
Itead WiFi Gadgets and More
I have just received a second Sonoff SNZB-02 temperature-sensing module (see my recent articles on Zigbee) which I have suitably renamed from the default cryptic name to SNZB-02-2 and this came complete with a battery sitting at 100% – here’s a thing, outside in our pergola, I’ve had a DHT22…
Zigbee development Part 2 – Aqara Sensors
I’m becoming increasingly impressed by the tiny Aqara sensors – first of today’s bunch – Original Aqara Smart Motion Sensor And here below is the motion sensor, running smoothly with my new Electrolama ZZH dongle (coordinator) running Zigbee2MQTT. I long-pressed the tiny button on the side/top/bottom of the sensor and…
Non-Contact IR InfraRed Thermometer
I just received this non-contact IR thermometer in the post from Banggood… looking good but at first I was a bit confused about the access control – according to the box there should be contacts under a quality control label on the bottom – no contacts for access control on…
Owon HDS272S Handheld Oscilloscope
Over the years I’ve had a number of Owon scopes, function generators and power supplies – so I’m pleased to now have my hands on their handheld HDS272S, a new, portable dual-channel scope which can also be used as a multimeter and function generator. As you’ll see, the scope/meter has…
Xiaovv B1 3MP Waterproof Outdoor IP Camera
Ok, so another outdoor video camera – so what? Well, unlike some other low-priced IP cameras – this one is 3MP as against 2MP – that’s a good start – and I noted it uses the V380 APP – which I already use with other WiFi IP cameras. AI human…
Atomic Radio-Controlled Silent Clock
This will be a short one about this clock module I just received from Banggood – not much you can say about a radio clock module that isn’t in the spec above though I have changed my original reviwe having realised the clock is not entierly reliable here in Granada…
Bluetooth 5 Earbuds Comparison
In today’s postbag, two sets of earbuds arrived. Here they are… AIRAUX AA-UM10 TWS Earphones and the BlitzWolf® BW-ANC3 bluetooth V5.0 Earphones. As usual, cost willl vary depending on where you live – see the links above for details and technical specs To look at, there’s not a lot between…
Alexa-Applestrudel (formerly Cakebaked formerly Remote2)
That’s node-red-contrib-alexa-applestrudel etc. – but the title was getting too long:-). This article is about Alexa-related “nodes” for Node-Red. To give this set of eight nodes (seven visible) their full title, the original offering was known as node-red-contrib-alexa-remote2 and when I first wrote this blog entry in September 2019. The…
Xiaomi Mijia 1S Second Generation Smart Vacuum
For a few days now we’ve been testing the very neat 2nd generation Xiaomi Mijia 1S Robot Vacuum Cleaner – I’ve provided a Banggood link here but I should say immediately that I’ve recently been told that Banggood cannot sell Xiaomi in the USA – so any USA-based subscribers might…
Doogee S96 Pro Global Smartphone – Lovely
I LOVE getting new phones. the 8G/128G Doogee S96 Pro arrived this morning and with caviats I’m impressed for a budget phone. You can get the full spec from the Banggood link I’ve just entered above but I’ll give you some key points and my experience so far in here.…
Elecrow Crowbits Kits – Beginning Electronics
Some time ago, I noted a company called Elecrow in connection with a kit to turn a Raspberry Pi into a laptop (it’s all on their website in the link above and check out their Indiegogo link). But the RPi is NOT what this blog entry is about. I’m not…
Node-Red-Contrib-Timeout
This is a quick update to my node-red-contrib-timeout node for Node-Red. This is as always, available at https://flows.nodered.org also at https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-red-contrib-timeout The current version then is 1.1.5 which puts out the SAFE message at start-up and starts the default count-down. Interested viewers will find that as well as the normal msg.payload…
Huawei Honor Band 6 v Xiaomi Mi Band 6
When I wrote the first part of this back in April 15, 2021- it seemed that AliExpress would have the new Huawei Band 6 (GLOBAL) that week to I guessed that meant we outside of China would not be able to actually get one for maybe another 3 weeks –…