Category Archives: gadgets

Marvin the Respeaker

Posted on January 21, 2017 by Lawrie Griffiths

I have been playing with the Seeedstudio Respeaker Kickstarter device. It is designed to enable you to build your own Amazon Echo or Echo Dot devices and is similar to the circuit board from an Echo Dot. The software and … Continue reading →

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ESP8266 MQTT Relay

Posted on March 22, 2015 by Lawrie Griffiths

Another development board for the ESP8266 that I have tried is the Olimex ESP8266 EVB, which I bought from ebay. This has a relay, a button for flashing, a UEXT socket which includes the serial lines used for flashing and … Continue reading →

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ESP8266 Barometric pressure sensor

Posted on March 20, 2015 by Lawrie Griffiths

I have been experimenting with the ESP8266 for creating Wifi sensors. The nodemcu firmware makes programming it very easy. I have tried a few different development boards, and the nodemcu devkit seems the nicest for creating sensors. I bought it … Continue reading →

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My new RepRap Ormerod printer

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Lawrie Griffiths
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Raspberry Pi alternatives

Posted on July 26, 2013 by Lawrie Griffiths

Arduino Yun BeagleBone Black UDOO PCDuino Elektor Linux board Mars board CubieBoard Parallella Odroid U2 Mele A1000 Olimex Imx233 Via APC

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Why do I need 5, 6 or 7 boxes to watch stuff on my TV?

Posted on June 28, 2013 by Lawrie Griffiths

All I really want to do is listen to music and watch stuff on my TV. And my granchildren want to play some games. Why is it so hard? In my living room, like many people, I have a large … Continue reading →

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Powermat wireless charging

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Lawrie Griffiths

I bought a Powermat wireless charger and two universal receivers for it. These were very cheap as the device has now been discontinued as it does not support the Qi standard and so will not charge the latest phones like … Continue reading →

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Airwick room node

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Lawrie Griffiths

I saw this article on using an Airwick Freshmatic i-motion compact as the case for a room node. It comes with the pir, batteries, case, cables etc., so I bought one for £7.99 including postage to try it out. This … Continue reading →

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Room Sensor

Posted on November 29, 2012 by Lawrie Griffiths

My original idea was to have a sensor in each room that recorded: The temperature The light level The sound level Occupancy of the room I could then detect if lights were left on in unoccupied rooms, or if music … Continue reading →

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Nokia N82 display

Posted on November 29, 2012 by Lawrie Griffiths

I bought a Nokia N82 display with an Arduino interface board from Andy Brown. I have mainly used it plot real-time wave forms, but not very seriously yet. I might use it as a display for leJOS on RPi. It … Continue reading →

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