I’ve had lots of Shelly products in my time – I recall trying out MQTT on them and even got some partially integrated into Node-Red (I hate using lots of APPs) but now as I begin to feel my way around Home Assistant – (with help) I have my first couple of shelly products properly integrated along with Sonoff, Smart life and many more. The Shelly H&T Gen 3 – what’s ANOTHER wall mounted stat – no big deal? Well, THIS one is LOVELY – the display is big enough to see at a distance and in pretty much any kind of light including bright sunlight. I love it… In itself that would be nice but in the ..read more

As you do, I was looking around AliExpress having just parted with a couple of smartplugs to help out a friend in a hurry, when I discovered some specials – generic Smartlife plugs – 16A and 20A, with power monitoring. I think Ali had a limit of 3 devices so I found 2 almost identical offers and ended up with three 20A “Tuya” plugs with power monitoring on one order – total inc packing to Spain €11.99 and one seemingly identical 20A plug at €3.19 all in for a total of €15.18 for 4 power-monitoring smartplugs. When they arrived the packaging was fine – I took them out of the identical boxes an ..read more

A couple of weeks ago I received an email in German (no, I don’t speak German) from Ugreen who offered to send me a charger to look at. I’ve had stuff from Ugreen before and no problem so – why not! So yesterday I received the new U green Charger in the mail – nice packaging. The very first thing that came to my attention was the look it – it has a pair of boots attached to the two mains prongs – a gimmick but a good start. I removed those and plugged the unit into the mains. That was a very short-lived experiment as I got sidetracked and it wasn’t until late evening when I came to bed and plu ..read more

AWS Polly is great for adding speech to Raspberry Pi and similar, especially with the “neural” enhancement. Regular readers will know that for years I was a great fan of using Ivona speech on my Raspberry Pi. In Node-Red I used the free Ivona service to provide high quality speech in Node-Red at the heart of my home control setup. Ivona, good as it was, has been defunct now for some time.  I’m now using Polly successfully on RPi4 and RPi5. I’ve been asked what I use this for? Well, I do of course have Alexa and Google Home, both integrated to some extent int ..read more

Elsewhere I’m wriing about moving from Raspberry Pi 4 and legacy 32-bit Bullseye (Pi OS) to Raspberry Pi 5 and 64-bit Bookworm (Pi OS). While we await an RPi5 audio dongle to hopefully get command-line audio to work in RPi5 and as I don’t have the USB audio dongle yet (thanks, AliExpress) I thought, having backed up my RPi4 and 5, I’d take the RPi4 and do a from-scratch installation of Bullseye on the latter. So, armed with my PC and RPi4 (Ethernet connection as usual for me), Balena Etcher on the PC and a handy SD (I typically use 32GB SDs), I selected the LITE version of Pi OS Bookworm 64-bi ..read more

Today this turned up in the post here in Spain by CTT courier. Thinking about it I’ve no idea why – but it’s here so I thought I’d write a few lines about it. Typically, mains powered USB devices act as routers (I’d call them repeaters but never mind). As regular readers know, I use Sonoff a LOT – but I only use their APP when forced by circumstance, so for Zigbee I use their inexpensive Zigbee dongle as the central Zigbee coordinator (my thinking says router but again never mind) in my Zigbee2MQTT-based network for my home control and a variety of mains powered Zigbee devices as “routers ..read more

When I say 16GB, I mean 16GB of RAM. In the world of single-board computers (SBCs), it isn’t unusual to focus on the Raspberry Pi as probably the most well known SBC but in some ways, the Orange Pi Plus stands out as a compelling choice for hobbyists and makers. Orange Pi 5 Plus provides abundant interfaces, including two HDMl output ports, one HDMl input port , two PCIe extended 2.5G Ethernet ports, an M.2 M-Key slot that supports installation of NVMe SSDs, and an M.2 E-Key slot that supports Wi-Fi6/BT modules. In addition, Orange Pi 5 Plus has two USB 3.0, two USB 2.0, and two Type-C (one of ..read more

For many years I’ve been using SSH sessions on my PC to talk to headless SBCs such as Raspberry Pi. I HATE monochrome editing and almost as badly hate 16-colour editor. Be wary before going further that 256-colours is not for every situation. Disclaimer out of the way – with Nano editor and my chosen PC tool Mobaxterm I’ve been stuck in that last-century mode for some time – and Mobaxterm documentation doesn’t help – I’m as good as anyone at finding solutions on Google – but wasted many an hour on this one – until now. Mobaxterm, only when creating or EDITING a session has the option to chang ..read more

So some of you know I’ve been dragged into using Docker for adding packages to the new(ish) Raspberry Pi 5 and Pi OS 64-bit “Bookworm” combo. Choices were – update my “the script” as the RPi 5 / Bookworm combo seems to break the odd part of the script – or start using Docker. So it’s a bit cheeky me calling this a tutorial but this is what I’ve picked up from my friend Antonio to date, in the process, migrating (successfully) in my case from from RPi4 (32 bit Pi OS “Bullseye”) to RPI5 (64 bit Pi OS – “Bookworm”). Using Docker – the “containers” can be migrated to any other host – for example ..read more

Tasmota and Autonomous Turn-off Thoughts Right now I’m in the process of rewview writing some of which can’t be released until product launch dates – meantime – one of the main features of the free, open-source Tasmota device control firmware is it’s ability to control various devices and monitor various sensors internally without resorting to “the cloud” – or “someone else’s server” for the cynical. Tasmota comes in rather handy if you don’t 100% trust your external provider Internet connection (something I’ve come to realise is very sensible here in rural Spain). So while I like to use Googl ..read more