Harvesting ESP8266 from old smart plugs

I've been upgrading all my smart plugs to Matter compatible devices which are much easier to set up and manage in a single app. As a result I have a box of older devices each of which needs a different app.

This one opened up easily with some standard screws. The ESP8266 chip is on a little board that was easy to remove.

The two pins in the top right of the image above are serial TX and RX. The two pins on the bottom right are 3.3V and GND on the right edge.

On the back is an 8 Mbit memory chip giving 1MB of storage.

The pin marked 0 is GPIO 0 used to get to boot mode. G is ground.

I did a google image search of the front and found this helpful site describing the pins.

I used a USB serial board set to 3.3V and hooked Tx and Rx lines as well as +V and Ground.

This board also exposes GPIO4, 5 & 12 which could be handy.

To put the chip into boot mode you connect the GPIO 0 pin (simply labelled 0) to ground and plug in the power - in the form of the USB serial device.

ls /dev/tty.* to find the serial device. ESPTool was able to confirm the size of the flash memory.

esptool --port /dev/tty.usbserial-A50285BI flash-id

esptool v5.6.0

Connected to ESP8266 on /dev/tty.usbserial-A50285BI:

Chip type:          ESP8266EX

Features:           Wi-Fi, 160MHz

Crystal frequency:  26MHz

MAC:                cc:50:e3:67:04:66

Stub flasher running.

Flash Memory Information:

=========================

Manufacturer: 85

Device: 6014

Detected flash size: 1MB

Hard resetting via RTS pin...

I downloaded the 1MB version of Micropython. And flashed it to the chip.

esptool --port /dev/tty.usbserial-A50285BI --baud 460800 write-flash --flash-size=detect 0  ESP8266_GENERIC-FLASH_1M-20260824-v1.29.0.bin

Unplugging, remove the link from GPIO 0 to ground and re-connect to USB serial.

I used putty to talk to the serial device at 115200 and up came the python REPL.

Not sure what I'll do with these microcontrollers but it's better than putting them in the bin. Mains smartplugs also have some other useful bits including a relay that might be worth harvesting. 

Flying saucer end fed half wave antenna

A big fan of end fed half wave antennas, particularly for portable use. Purchased a Flying saucers antenna from AliExpress for AU$56 and tried it out today.

The case is a clever design, easy to draw out the wire and easy to wind back in with an index finger.

I ran a rope over a tree branch using a drone and pulled the end up to test.

The wire it came with was a bit long - certainly that's better than it being too short - so I had a few down and up cycles to bring it up to the 40m band.

The unit has an SO-239 in the centre which is convenient. The toroid is burried inside the middle of the winder and when the wire it all out I can see that it is very small. They claim 25W SSB but I'd hesitate to run more than 10W in to this little thing. After shortening the wire a bit it gives a good match on 40 and related bands above.

Reasonable value for the money considering you get an Unun, winder, wire and socket. I've made many ununs myself but the wire winding is always the most annoying thing and this kind of winder prevents twisting the wire.

Diversity reception of FreeDV RADE

On Sundays from 9:30am local time I conduct a FreeDV RADE net on 7177kHz or similar. There are stations from VK3 (local to me), VK2, VK5 and sometimes VK7. Recently conditions have been such that local stations can't hear each other but remote stations have a good signal.

It's always been possible to pipe audio from a WebSDR in to apps like FreeDV to use a remote receiver but recently I added a feature in to my FreeDV implementation for macOS that lets me configure two receiver audio channels. A RADE modem runs on the second receiver and monitors SNR. If the SNR of the other receiver is 3dB better for a few seconds the app switches to that input. Here it is in operation using RX2 (you'll need to click to enlarge).

The key bit is the status line which shows the currently used receiver in bold.

There's a bit of a bump when switching decoder pipelines but it works well enough. One weird thing is that my transmit signal is good to the remote SDR so I sometimes hear my last words and I do decode my EOO callsign frame.

The fatal flaw in this is that it's not much good running a net where I can hear people who can't hear me.

The one important piece of the puzzle is the audio routing. I use LoopBack for macOS I'm not sure how you'd do this on Linux or Windows but presumably there's ways.

macOS morse code decoder using machine learning - port of DeepCW

I've been eagerly awaiting someone clever to apply machine learning to decoding morse code and I just stumbled upon this excellent project by e04 called deep-cw-decoder.

As I'm inclinded to do, I asked my friend Claude to port it to Swift for macOS and this is the result:

It's the best morse decoder I've ever tried. Here's a video of it in action:

My port is freely available here and I've made a downloadable app for macOS 27 here. 

Amazing Open firmware for the Xiegu X6200

Icom radios are great but the firmware rarely gets updated. I've been making my own user interfaces by making software that talks to them but this morning I grabbed some amazing open firmware for my Xiegu X6200 from https://openx6x00.org

Amazing improvement over the stock Xiegu software. A great thing about this is it lives on a microSD card and if you remove the card the radio boots up as it was.

I joined the MRARC 80m net using the radio and got good reports running 10W when normally I run 100W. Just goes to show it's all about the antenna. Here's some bits of the net including another Xiegu station running a G1M that sounds excellent.

This video was made using the built-in screen recording feature. I then connected to the radio over it's built-in web server and downloaded the video files.

Icom-Control - a new macOS app to control some Icom radios over a network

On a bit of a roll here with SDR style user interfaces. I've been working on macOS 27 software to connect to some Icom radios. 

So far only tested on IC-705, IC-7760 and IC-7300 Mk2 (Thanks VK2AWN for the last one).

It works fine over ethernet and Wifi. There's also USB connection but, understandably, the spectrum display is much slower.

This software is still under development so there will be bugs. Check out the built-in help for more info.

Transmitting you'll need to go into Menu, Set, Connectors, MOD Input and set it to LAN (or USB).

More info, download link and updates here.

Feedback and bug reports most welcome.

Joined our club net using a Hermes Lite 2

My local club, the Macedon Ranges Amateur Radio Club (MRARC), has a weekly net on 80m and this week I joined using a Hermes Lite 2 driven by my new macOS software HermesNeo. It was a very noisy night on the band due to storms but reports of my signal were good.

Richard, VK3LRJ, kindly loaned me a 100W Elecraft amplifier but I only get enough drive out of the Hermes to get about 40W out. That was clearly enough to be heard by everyone. Earlier in the afternoon I had contacts with ZL and VK7.

All of this software work is, of course, elaborate procrastonation to avoid working on home brew radio hardware.

Tech Talk on ABC - Can Microsoft turn this ship around?

Apple gave Windows a run for its money when it switched its Macs from Intel processors to its own Apple Silicon chips, delivering big gains in performance and battery life and leaving many PCs struggling to keep up. 

Microsoft is fighting back with new Nvidia processors, improvements to Windows 11 and a push to run AI directly on our computers. Can Windows finally close the gap? 

Peter Marks, software developer and technology commentator from Access Informatics, joined Philip Clark and listeners to Nightlife with the latest tech news and information. Listen here.

Incidentally, I note that Philip has been presenting Nightlife for ten years. There's a nice write-up here.

Bargain 5000mAh 21700 Li-ion battery

Heath, VK3TWO, spoke about Meshcore at the latest Macedon Ranges Amateur Radio club meeting and mentioned a low cost way to get extra batteries to charge solar powered devices. These Click brand USB-C phone powerbanks are $6.98 at Bunnings.

They are a bit hard to get in to. The top has strong clips and, I assume, glue. I used a Dremmel cutting wheel to reveal the contents. It's pretty much all battery. I've seen similar 21700 batteries for $37 on their own.

It looks like a proper charging circuit with a temperature sensor. One thing to watch for is that these were in a big bin near the service desk and one of the four I purchased turned out to have lightning output rather than USB-C - that's the one I cracked open.

The other great tip Heath had was for building solar powered Meshcore repeaters, by buying a decent solar powered garden light and replacing the light with your radio gear. The good ones have one or two 18650 batteries inside them. They are also designed to be left outside.

HermesNeo - macOS software for Hermes Lite 2

I've had a Hermes Lite 2 on the bench for some time but couldn't find SDR software that I liked. This is very early software so it's not ready for prime time but is working for me on the bench here. You'll note that FreeDV RADE is a first class mode in this application.

Here's an over the air test of FreeDV RADE 1 and 2. The audio you hear is what is decoded by FreeDVNeo connected to an X6200.

 

Note sure how common the Hermes Lite 2 is, and of those owners, how many have macOS. I believe other radios are somewhat compatable and I'd be interested to hear if any others just work - as they say.

More info and download link here.