During a recent holiday in England, I spent a few days in a location without any links to the internet at all. No mobile phone signal, no WiFi hotspots. Nothing. It was interesting to see the impact this had. There were countless times when I wanted to check something on a map. Or the opening […]
Recently, I attended #offcamp – a barcamp style discussion around open data which was organised by @bcs_isleofman and free to attend. The morning sessions were OK and it was good to see that some thought is being given to making data open and available, especially data that has been collected by governments and already paid for […]
This week, I tried some different firmware on the ESP8266 modules that I have. I flashed a version of NodeMCU which allows Lua scripts (and other files) to be uploaded. By using this software:Â https://github.com/reischle/CaptiveIntraweb I was able to turn the ESP8266 into a wifi access point which serves a static site, regardless of what web […]
I was lucky enough to get some vouchers for Amazon for my birthday recently. I bought some things I needed, but then had a couple of pounds left on the voucher. I decided to ‘waste’ this on some MiFare Classic 1K RFID cards. These can be formatted to the NDEF standard, which means that many […]
I first saw an ESP8266 board at OggCamp as part of a central heating control project. Recently, I’ve been researching a project for CodeClub that needs to control devices remotely over some kind of radio link and so I thought it was time to get to grips with these devices. They turned up in the […]
Analogue signals are great in that they are simple enough to generate and demodulate, but they suffer in that the signal quality degrades when sent over a noisy radio link. With radio voice systems, this is heard as pops, crackle, hiss etc. and the problem gradually gets worse as signals get weaker. Human ears do […]