The blog has been dormant since our trip to Australia last year so here is a warning.
This is a ‘Techie’ post about some of my winter projects.
Wi-Fi Router
Boaters amongst our readers will know all about the vagaries of ‘mobile broadband’, we currently use EE but connecting it to our Humax satellite box was a bit of a Heath Robinson affair as the satellite box has no Wi-Fi capability. I was also unconvinced that EE was metering my data usage correctly so I decided to bite the bullet and invest in a proper 4G router which could not only provide a wired connection for the sat box but monitor my data use.
After a false start with an ASUS 4G-N12 which after several weeks of consulting with Asus support it was concluded that ‘it was a known issue’ that the data monitoring function did not work correctly. PC World refunded my purchase without any quibble and I popped next door to Maplins and purchased a TP-Link Archer MR200 which was on offer for £99.99 (that’s £25 less than the Asus) and the bonus is that it does what it’s supposed to.
Birthday Pi
My birthday was last month and Joy bought me a Raspberry Pi, this is a mini computer, kind of a 21st century Sinclair Spectrum. After a steep learning curve involving some programming I’ve managed to hook it up to to the router so I now have a 500GB hard drive as remote storage and have also installed a MiniDLNA media server so we can listen to our music collection wirelessly on our tablets.
Meters
The metering system on the boat which is part of the Heart Interface has been returning false readings for some while so I purchased some new meters from eBay and now have some pretty blue meters which after finding how to adjust them now give accurate readings. Oh, and I’ve re-installed Windows 10 on my laptop which has speeded it up considerably.
See, I warned you it was a boring post!