This is another cheap plug in Wi-Fi mains socket that uses the ESP8266, comparable to the Sonoff S20. Cost was £8.34 + £2.34 shipping to the UK from TVC-Mall. It is also available from Banggood for a little more and...

I already had most of my lights converted to RGBW but couldn’t resist getting one of these when I heard they contained the ESP8266 and could be reprogrammed, I eventually ended up with three after buying a second to verify...

The Arilux AL-LC01 is much smaller than the H801 RGB strip controller I covered in my last post but does much the same job. I picked this one up from Banggood for only £5.69 According to the specs it will...

I picked a couple of these up from Aliexpress earlier in the year, I had been planning to DIY something similar but when I spotted these Aiboo H801 RGBWW units for only £8.35 each there didn’t seem much point.  They support the...

At the same time I bought the Sonoff S20 sockets I picked up a couple of these Sonoff POW units which are a similar inline mains switching module to the original Sonoff (now called the Sonoff Basic) but with the...

Itead have expanded their Sonoff range a lot since I wrote about the original Sonoff module over a year ago. That module has been in use since then and has been rock solid although I did switch from the ESPEasy firmware...

I picked this rather obscure USB device up from Banggood for only £6.69, it can receive and transmit codes for PT2262, PT2260, PT2264, PT2240, EV1527, HS2303-PT and the many compatible devices which means it will work with a huge number of cheap 433MHz devices...

Here are two similar but also rather different WiFi controlled mains switching relay modules that both use the ESP8266 WiFi SoC. Both come with a nice case, can be reprogrammed with your own firmware and are exceedingly cheap for what you...

I have been using my Amazon Echo and a Raspberry Pi running AlexaPi for voice control of lights, appliances and modes using ha-bridge, a Java app that emulates the Philips Hue API which is one of the few devices that the Echo supports natively. I...

For years I used X10 for all my remote controlled sockets but the unreliability eventually drove me to RF based sockets, the Home Easy ones in particular as you can’t beat the price, often available for circa £20 for a pack...

A little Saturday afternoon project last weekend was putting together this geiger counter kit from RH Electronics in Israel, paired with a soviet SBM-20 Geiger-Müller tube sourced from an eBay seller in the Ukraine. Total cost was £32 which seems very...

The reason behind the last post was so that I could create a node for Node-RED to send pins to the Timeline on a Pebble smartwatch. To use this you obviously need a Pebble Time (or a classic Pebble once...

There are a number of different libraries available for sending pins to the Timeline on a Pebble watch, including those for Javascript, Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP and C.  To use any of these you need a unique user token which...