The ESP32 Color Kit Grande is here

The Color Kit Grande is the latest update of the hardware kits which I started selling back in 2015. It started with the ESP8266 and a tiny B/W OLED display. A little later the ESP8266 Color Kit followed and added a bigger display with resistive touch screen to it. Buyers also had to do a bit of soldering to complete the kit.

CH9102 Serial-To-USB Driver for Mac OS X

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Recently more and more ESP32 hardware is appearing with the WCH CH9102 Serial-To-USB chip. I assume lower costs and higher availability are the reason for this. Lower costs compared to FTDI chips, to the Silicon Labs CP2102 or CP2104. But when I recently started working …

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Squix: The Exciting Next Step!

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In the last few years blog.squix.org has grown from a personal idea dumping ground to a well visited page around maker projects. Two years ago I started looking for a way to make it easier for you to rebuild my projects. The first step was to provide links …

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Finally: Support Forum

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It was about time that I would offer you a better way to ask me questions than post comments and a contact form on the About page. Thanks to the nude of one reader I finally picked a forum software and set it up. 

IoTCon in Munich: Impressions from Day 2

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In my last post I shared my impressions from the first day of the Internet-of-Things conference in Munich. Here is the write-up of day 2 which covers a low-cost smart home, Docker for Internet-of-Things running on ARM (Raspberry Pi’s), introduction to Web Bluetooth and a comparison …

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Laser Cutted Case for the WeatherStation

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@WaldyWiz designed a wonderful case for the ESP8266 WeatherStation which you can lasercut yourself. Thank you for sharing!Got inspired? Order the development kit here: https://blog.squix.org/product/weatherstation-kit-w-white-oled for US $24.50 Resources https://wizbrewery.wordpress.com/2016/02/21/iot-laser-cut-case/ https://github.com/wizbrewery/iot-laser-cut-case    

ESP8266 Products Hitting the Market

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Today I discovered a new ESP8266 based product on Banggood which looks quite interesting: the SONOFF (maybe short for switch on/off?) from ITead Studio  which is a WiFi controllable switch in a nice and safe case for between USD $4.85 – 9. Not bad! Obviously I …

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3D Printed WeatherStation Case

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Dennis van Elteren sent me this wonderful WeatherStation case project. If you want to print this yourself you can download the .stl files from here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/a6692237ysiwj7m/AAARxjrN0PK5s8WQT_SeEBeIa?dl=0  Thank you Dennis for sharing!

ESP32 unboxing!

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Santa came early this year! Espressif has sent me one of the early test boards of the new kid in IoT town, the ESP32. Compared to the ESP8266 which kind of dominated the hacker space in the last 12 months the ESP32 is very powerful! …

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ESP8266 OLED display library release

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Recently I released a new version of the esp8266-oled-ssd1306 library. This library allows you to control these wonderful little displays from a ESP8266 with little effort. When I first wrote the library for the WeatherStation I had the problem that 128×64 pixels never seemed enough space …

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ESP8266 Weather Station Preview Video

The Weather Station code comes with a clock, current conditions such as temperature, humidity, pressure and precipitation, as well as a  3 day weather forecast. Get a glimpse here: Want to get one yourself? Order one in the shop!

ESP8266: DIY Wifi Kitchen Scale

This week I finally received all the necessary pieces to build a internet connected kitchen scale. The ingredients are: a load cell (Wikipedia), a high resolution ADC (HX711) and of course a ESP8266 based NodeMCU V1.0 module. For the moment I’m not logging the data …

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ESP8266: NodeMCU Dev Kit V1.0 Review

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This post is due for a while now but I had so much fun actually using the NodeMCU that I totally forgot (or postponed) to write a review about it. So, let’s get started: The new NodeMCU V1.0 Dev Kit module Image Source: https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-devkit-v1.0 The first …

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ESP8266: NodeMCU Custom Build

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My colleague Marcel recently developed a web based tool that lets you choose the modules which will be compiled into the NodeMCU build. This saves you the trouble to setup your own build server with tool chain and can save you a lot of space …

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ESP8266: Flight-O-Matic

Preview for my augmented reality project: A RaspberryPi with SDR-RTL dongle picks up signals from airplanes in my relative neighbourhood. When an airplane becomes visible from by living room window it sends detailed flight information to 6 modules of 8×8 Led Matrix elements such as …

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ESP8266: NodeMCU Dev Kit Review

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Introduction I was very excited when the very same group that developed the NodeMcu Lua firmware announced their ESP8266 Dev board. I ordered one from Banggood and yesterday it arrived after more than a month. Quality The PCB seems to be well done. The silk screen …

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ESP8266: ESP-201 breakout board review

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Today finally a new package from China arrived containing an ESP8266-ESP201 bought on aliexpress. I had ordered two pieces and each came in a little plastic bag and stuck in protective foam. The bag also contained a tiny antenna that can be plugged into the connector …

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ESP8266: Test board review

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Recently a test board for the ESP8266 ESP-12 arrived. I ordered it on AliExpress and took several weeks to arrive. Since the description was really bad I had to reverse engineers the functions and pins: Pin layout of the test board As you can see the board …

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ESP8266: trying out frankenstein firmware

I just gotten into the mood of trying out firmwares for the ESP8266. There is one that behaves similar to a busybox command line tool. Download the binary from here, flash it to the ESP8266 and connect to it over the serial channel: https://github.com/nekromant/esp8266-frankenstein So far …

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Live reload with appengine-maven-plugin

Google’s appengine-maven-plugin is cool. Especially for deploying your app to the cloud. But for developing it can be cumbersome, since the hot deploy mechanism is not very stable and you often have to restart the devserver. Since I wanted to get more into the whole …

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Converting keystores

JKS to P12 keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore keystore.jks -srcstoretype JKS -deststoretype PKCS12 -destkeystore keystore.p12 P12to JKS keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore keystore.p12 -srcstoretype PKCS12 -deststoretype JKS -destkeystore keystore.jks

New tricks; revamped user interface

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August 1st is the national holiday in Switzerland. Having a longer weekend also lets me work more on Feederator. In the last few days Feederator learned some cool new tricks, which I’d like to share with you Public Change Log For the users and my …

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Feederator, Kindle and PDF

I’m using Feederator myself to send interesting posts to my Kindle to read it later. To do this you can simple drill into the detail view of a post. There you’ll find a social bookmarking widget, labled with “share”. In the popup select “more” and …

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New Features: Searching the archive

I’m trying to improve Feederator.org. Sometimes changes are rather invisible to the end user. Sometimes new features extend the use of feederator rather dramatically. I enabled such a feature today: searching the archives with full text key words. To keep your inbox clean Feederator moves …

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New Layout

More and more, the current layout seemed not to be as convenient as we first thought. The layout looked like it was designed with a mobile device in mind, than running nicely on a desktop. But since it is our long term plan to bring …

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A word about Feederator…

Did you ever want to control which items of a (RSS) feed should be used by your consumer and which should be ignored? Feederator helps you to organize your feeds, filter specific items or even mix two feeds together to a new one. If not …

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Feederator Beta out!

We’ve been working on Feederator a while now. It is a great feeling, now that it is finally out for users to try it. But be warned: Feederator is improving constantly. We’re adding features and fixing bugs on a daily basis. If you want to …

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