Posts Tagged: firmware

2Updating firmware on Conbee II stick for Home Assistant

Published by & filed under Home Assistant. Last updated .

I use a Con­Bee II USB stick for my zig­bee mesh in Home Assist­ant. I wanted to update the firm­ware and found it is easi­est to do this by shut­ting down HA, unplug­ging the stick and using a win­dows machine to update it, then put­ting it back into the HA sys­tem and boot­ing HA back up. There are full instruc­tions for the pro­cess in Win­dows on Dresden Elektronik’s website

0Getting the most out of HikVision Cameras

Published by & filed under SmartHome & IoT. Last updated .

I have a 4Mpix Hik­Vi­sion mini dome cam­era for CCTV on the house. It provides a pretty reas­on­able pic­ture con­sid­er­ing the price, but the man­age­ment inter­face is a bit rub­bish and get­ting it set up with any­thing is a bit of a nuis­ance, so heres some notes on get­ting it working…
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3Cheap WiFi SmartPlugs with SmartThings

Published by & filed under SmartHome & IoT. Last updated .

SmartTh­ings com­pat­ible smart plugs are annoy­ingly expens­ive — typ­ic­ally around £40. This is far too expens­ive to con­sider buy­ing many of. There are how­ever WiFi plugs avail­able online for around £10 that don’t offi­cially work with SmartTh­ings. Most of them are based on the ESP8266 chip which can be reflashed with new firm­ware that will work with SmartTh­ings. Below I doc­u­ment my tri­als and tribu­la­tions with hack­ing these plugs
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2Inside HDD LogoFix for problems with Seagate Momentus XT

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

I’ve had prob­lems with the new Seag­ate Momentus XT hard­drive in my new­est HTPC.  The PC was lock­ing up every 48 hours or so (which may have been related to standby), was occa­sion­ally jerky, and upon reboot would often refuse to boot with an error about a miss­ing boot device, which could only be fixed with a hard power cycle.  There is a firm­ware update for the drive to SD25 but this did­n’t resolve the issue.  How­ever, after I changed the power man­age­ment set­tings in Win­dows 7 to nev­er spin-down the hard­drive, the prob­lems all went away.  Success!

Update (14-Sept-2011).  Seag­ate has released firm­ware SD28.  There are reports that this fixes sev­er­al issues and is a worth­while update.

2Helios NeoDigits logoNeoDigits / Helios Network Media Players

Published by & filed under Network Media Players. Last updated .

I recently had cause to resur­rect my old NeoDi­gits Helios X3000 net­work media play­er, and noticed that Helios have deceased.  Sadly this means links to their soft­ware and firm­ware are no longer avail­able.  Thanks to Ravi Srivast­ava and Sean on myce I was able to find altern­at­ive links, although as of Decem­ber 2012 these are no longer act­ive either.  For­tu­nately I grabbed everything whilst I still could.

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