I’ve been busily beavering away at a commercial project for the last couple of weeks but that ends at the weekend and I hope to soon have some more reviews of new and interesting products for you including some surprisingly cheap SBCs. Meanwhile, close to the heart of many of use – the IOT user interface remains a challenge. There are several of course – the dashboards are great unless you want to control something – and you will know that in this blog I’ve discussed the Node-Red UI and Blynk to name but two.
I dismissed Blynk because the interface though beautiful was simply too buggy – or rather a combination of that and the Node-Red interface. Well, the good news is that part of that problem is solved. TZAPUs new web sockets code seems to be rock-solid. The only bit of the puzzle that needs fixing is the actual Blynk App. For reasons beyond me no-one seems to have noticed that if you PAUSE the APP and then continue, it knows nothing of any changes that happened while it was paused. Come out of it and go back in and fine – it picks the info up from the server – but simply pausing is an issue – maybe no-one thought that something other than the APP might be controlling your IOT – yes, hard to believe. However this morning I got acknowledgement that this will be fixed on the next sub-release – which means that by the look of it we have a fully working interface.
Meanwhile node-red-contrib-UI is due a facelift and Andrei has been working on that – sadly despite spending ages on this I’ve been unable to get the new upgrade to work – I’m confident however that this will be resolved.. and then we will have at least two decent, easy to use interfaces between Node-Red (and hence most if not all IOT) and our phones.
Time will tell. This weekend we’re off to visit friends, next week I’m putting my office together and hopefully collecting some PCBs to control Nextion displays and as soon as my new office is in a state to do some R&D, expect to see new reviews and more info.
