Yesterday I decided to resurrect my website and blog which I took down about five years ago when my dedicated host died. My domain has sat empty since then and I had not been sharing my wisdom with the world. So I’ve decided to bring it back, but the database was Joomla 1.6 and the new Joomla is 3.x and that is one hell of a leap in versions, clearly it wasn’t plain sailing. I imported the database elements I needed from an SQL dump that I had from my backups and they had a different Joomla table prefix which was essential because the tables had different schemas (the columns were different). The important thing was finding how I could make a transfer of the articles from the old table to the new table, I started to construct an insert statement which mapped all the new table to the old values, but I am impatient and I wondered if there was another way of doing this. Fortunately I found the upgrade SQL for 3.x: https://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=760150#p2910019 then I used a simple “Operation” to transfer the “_content” table in phpMySQLAdmin. Then I needed to fix the “_categories” section and there were some numbering issues which needed dealing with. My work is not complete but it has filled things out!

 

I’ve been playing a lot with home automation, one of the interesting things that I have found are the products of Itead.cc and in particular their Sonoff home automation products. I just received one of their latest products the Sonoff LED Dimmer. Of course I don’t care about their software, I want to make it use the ESPEasy firmware, which will need a re-flash, so I stripped it down and it is time to share those pictures with the world. The next step is to make it work by attaching a TTL-USB adaptor to the header that is visible on the ESP8266 card that rises out of the main board.

 {oziogallery 118}

I would comment that the build quality of the PCB is relatively poor, with lots of scrap solder and scratches on the bottom. The board has two channels attached for LEDs but there are also RGB points marked out on the PCB which are calling out to be tested.