How to use Sonoff POW with ESPurna Firmware and Domoticz Home Automation System

Sonoff POW is an ESP8266 based wireless switch with a power meter that comes pre-loaded with a closed-source firmware that works with eWelink app for Android or iOS by default. But we’ve also seen Sonoff POW, and other Sonoff wireless switches from the same family, can be flash with open source firmware supporting MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) lightweight messaging protocol such as ESPurna, and I initially sent data from Sonoff POW to ThingSpeak via an MQTT broker (mosquitto) to draw some pretty charts. I did that with the switch connected to a lightbulb, but I’ve since installed Sonoff POW in my office to measure the room’s power consumption minus the ceiling light and aircon as shown below. Sonoff cable mechanism is really a pain for hard copper wires, as they are hard to push inside the mechanism, and something come out. I finally managed by it took longer than […]

How to Install Domoticz Home Automation System in NanoPi NEO and Other ARM Linux Boards

I’ve recently started experimenting with IoT projects, and the first hurdle is to select the hardware and software for your projects are there are simply so many options. For the hardware your first have to choose the communication protocols for your sensors and actuators, and if you are going to go with WiFi, ESP8266 is the obvious solution, used together with your favorite low cost Linux development board such as Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi to run some IoT server software locally or leveraging the cloud. But the most difficult & confusing part for me was to select the server software / cloud services as there are just so many options. I prefer having a local server than something running only in the cloud, as my Internet goes a few hours a month, so I started with a solution combining ThingSpeak with MQTT gathering data from Sonoff power switches running […]

Getting Started with Onion Omega2+ LEDE WiFi IoT Board and Expansion Dock

Onion Omega2 LEDE (OpenWrt fork) WiFi board is powered by Mediatek MT7688 MIPS SoC, targets IoT projects, and sells for as low as $5. There are actually two versions: Omega2 with 64MB RAM, 16MB flash, and Omega2+ with 128MB RAM, 32MB flash and a micro SD slot. Onion sent me the latter for review, together with an expansion dock that allows powering up the board though USB , and adds a USB host port, an RGB LED, buttons, and access to GPIO via a female header. In this quick start guide, I’ll start by taking some unboxing pictures, and then report my experience following the documentation to configure the board, blink the RGB LED, and control a LED on a breadboard using a GPIO from the header. Onion Omega2+ Unboxing I received the two boards in their respective package, and which are both stored in anti-static bags. Let’s check Onion […]

Self-hosted OpenGL ES Development on Ubuntu Touch

Blu wrote BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition review – from a developer’s perspective – last year, and now is back with a new post explaining how to develop and deploy OpenGL ES applications directly on the Ubuntu Touch tablet. Ever since I started using a BQ M10 for console apps development on the go I’ve been wanting to get something, well, flashier going on that tablet. Since I’m a graphics developer by trade and by heart, GLES was the next step on the Ubuntu Touch for me. This article is about writing, building and deploying GLES code on Ubuntu Touch itself, sans a desktop PC. Keep that in mind if some procedure seems unrefined or straight primitive to you – for one, I’m a primitive person, but some tools available on the desktop are, in my opinion, impractical on the Touch itself. That means no QtCreator today, nor Qt, for […]

vThings WiFi CO2 Monitor Quick Start Guide

I’ve already checked out vThings CO2 Monitor hardware and we’ve seen it’s based on ESPrino ESP8266 board, and my model includes CM1106 CO2 sensor and BMP180 temperature and pressure sensor. I’ve now installed it in my kitchen, about 3 to 4 meters from the gas stove, and getting data to ThingSpeak. The door and window of my kitchen are open all day, and the wall have ventilation holes. That’s important for CM1106 sensor since it auto calibrates every 3 days in clear air. If you plan to use such sensor in a closed environment, you should buy Vthings with CM1102 CO2 sensor that costs more, but does not require calibration. Since all WiFi systems I’ve just so far starting AP mode for configuration, I first looked for an access point, but… nothing… Then I decided to read the documentation (might be useful at times), and the monitor is actually configured […]

Something is “Eating” my Android TV Box Internal Storage!

No, it’s not a joke. I’ve been playing for a while with Eweat R9 Plus Android TV box after inserting a 1TB hard drive in the SATA bay, but while in most other reviews, the apps and files used for testing are just taking around 3 GB, the 9.31 GB storage in that device was completely full, and I have yet to install some apps, and copy some files part of my testing procedure… I did not immediately find out about the “storage full” issue, as I first I just noticed Kodi would not start anywhere, and the default video app would just reboot after adjusting the volume… But let’s check what takes all that space… I had to uninstall 3Dmark in order to be able to take screenshots, which explains why I have a bit more space now, but the system reports all that space (and more???) is taken […]

Facebook Zstandard “zstd” & “pzstd” Data Compression Tools Deliver High Performance & Efficiency

Ubuntu 16.04 and – I assume – other recent operating systems are still using single-thread version of file & data compression utilities such as bzip2 or gzip by default, but I’ve recently learned that compatible multi-threaded compression tools such as lbzip2, pigz or pixz have been around for a while, and you can replace the default tools by them for much faster compression and decompression on multi-core systems. This post led to further discussion about Facebook’s Zstandard 1.0 promising both smaller and faster data compression speed. The implementation is open source, released under a BSD license, and offers both zstd single threaded tool, and pzstd multi-threaded tool. So we all started to do own little tests and were impressed by the results. Some concerns were raised about patents, and development is still work-in-progess with a few bugs here and there including pzstd segfaulting on ARM. Zlib has 9 levels of […]

Compress & Decompress Files Faster with lbzip2 multi-threaded version of bzip2

Bzip2 is still one of the most commonly used compression tools in Linux, but it only works with a single thread, and I’ve been made aware that lbzip2 allows multi-threaded bzip2 compressions which should lead to much better performance on multi-core systems. lbzip2 was not installed by default in my Ubuntu 16.04 machine, but it’s easy enough to install:

I have cloned mainline linux repository on my machine, so let’s see how long it takes to compress the directory with bzip2 (one core compression):

9 minutes and 22 seconds. Now let’s repeat the test with lbzip2 using all 8 cores from my AMD FX8350 processor:

2 minutes 32 seconds. Almost 4x times, not bad at all. It’s not 8 times faster because you have to take into account I/Os, and at the beginning the system is scanning the drive, using all 8-core but not all full throttle. […]

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