Once again it’s time to put up the Christmas lights on this year. I’m fitting those lovely string WS2812 LED lights to the tree. 400+ of them. Of course it’s 2025 and so we’ll be using WLED as usual – but this time with a sparkly new miniature and trendy…
Month: November 2025
Nous AZ7 Smart Zigbee Socket
Not a lot to say about the Nous ZigBee socket AZ7 except to say it’s a fairly normal looking smart socket with a button on the side for manual override on/off. It’s designed to run on ZigBee 3.0 (not WiFi) and handle 3680w load – that would be resistive load…
The Nous L14 Zigbee Smart Water Valve
You might want to look up my Sonoff BSP article in here for comparison – as the L14 device is in many ways similar to the BSP. The Nous L14 is a Zigbee smart water valve. It is compatible with Zigbee2MQTT, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa. Regular readers will know…
First Xmas Gift – The Apollo H-2 2025
If you’ve read my other Apollo blog entries, you’ll know I’m very impressed by their presence sensors and other ESP-based gadgets. This morning in the post arrived a small box from Apollo containing the Apollo annual holiday light-up, music-playing Xmas tree. Sadly, the Spanish post office didn’t believe the Apollo…
The All-New Sonoff Orb 4-in-1 Zigbee Button
Multi-scene buttons are not new, especially Zigbee. I have one or two from Aqara but this new Zigbee “scene switch” has a couple of features worth noting. It runs on a CR2477 battery and has four actual buttons in the one round removable button, which simply magnetically mounts to the…
NanoKVM Pro – Another new contender
Unlike the JetKVM, this new NanoKVM Pro, on connecting USB power and which came from the target machine, and the HDMI, this time a full-size HDMI connector, the target PC came up in my main PC browser (I found the address of the KVM from my router – I could…
Is it possible that speech recognition has finally matured?
I shouldn’t do this, but I’m going to. I got an ad this morning for a company selling speech recognition stuff that claims that now you can type as quickly as you can think. So I’m using it now, I’m not doing any corrections, so you won’t see this blog…