ALEXA Smart Plugs - More questions

Didn't work with my neighbour's car.

Simply not so with a properly designed one.

That rather gives the lie to your view that all chargers damage a battery if left on. Since the amount an unused lead acid would loose in a day so tiny as to be very difficult to measure. And since that self discharge is so low, why on earth would you need to charge it at all every day? Once a month would be more than enough.

Dave Plowman (News) pretended :

Not really. It was only on a quick 20 min charge, once per day.

Simple - 20 years ago how easy was it to find a time-clock which came on just once per month? I suppose I could have cascaded time-clocks to achieve it, but then it becomes awfully complicated. 20 mins per day, just brought my batteries nicely up to a full charge.

Not really, my car is parked in a dark garage and most of my batteries needing charging are also in my garage/workshop.

We will have to agree to disagree on that one.

Won't an Amazon Fire TV stick provide a good quality iPlayer as an alternative?

With a crude charger, that could very well do more damage than a decent one left on 24/7.

With my jump start pack/tyre inflator I simply charged it after a few uses. You soon get to know how often it needs charging when used for tyres. And it was pretty old, but the charger showed when the battery was full.

On Android and perhaps your laptop try:

Alexa app > more > add a device > tv > Fire tv

Alexa app > devices > + > add device > tv > Fire tv

I'd suggest you measure the float charge on the smart Lidl car battery charger - which costs about £14. It is hardly difficult to design for any float charge you want - from a fraction of an mA upwards.

The panel could be remote from the charging station or even outside(*). This genset top-up panel used to be ina north facing window with a nice view of trees, it doidn't work very well there. B-) Moved it to this east facing window with a fairly clear view of the sky and it's fine. It's had the (energy wasting) flashing blue LED moved to a surface box with switch that the flying lead that plugs into the genset is connected. Probably on 8 m of 2.5 T&E, current is so low there is negliable loss.

(*) Though how long it would last I'm not sure, it's probably only IP44, though when I opened one up there was silicone sealing things.

Did for mine when I went to Rio in 2016 for 5 or 6 weeks. Did connect it direcctly to the battery though, no point in using the ciggy socket as that gets switched off fairly early on in the car falling asleep...

As it's getting to winter I really ought to drag the genset out and run it into a fan heater for an hour or two to make sure it will start from the battery. B-) Being a diesel pull starting it is hard work, and not something I'd like to be doing in piss poor windy weather.

Donno, wouldn't want Amazon to be logging what we watch anyway. Got a Humax DSAT PVR that has iPlayer (and I think several of the other "catch up" services).

can't

Oooo, didn't know you could do that. Sort of surprised that Amazon haven't locked things down. Not that I have need of such a device, have ordinary wireless remote plugs that fullfill the ocasional need.

All the stuff I don't want...

Even better.

The only thing I'd possibly like to control remotely is the outside light so it's on when I get home. Ideally automatically. Half toyed with the idea of having something to detect the car's Bluetooth.

These plugs aren't made by Amazon, they're made by a no-brand Chinese firm using a software platform from Tuya (the 'Smart Life' app and firmware to connect to it). There's a variety of open source firmwares for the ESP8266, of which the one I've used is Tasmota (only chosen since it was the default of a tool called tuya-convert and it's 'good enough'). More recent Tuya firmware has locked down things a bit more against firmware replacement, but the solution to that is not to run the Smart Life app which updates the firmware. In the worst case you can just take it apart and access the ESP8266 programming pins - the firmware can't defend against that.

I've been playing with a Raspberry Pi, a £6 DVB-T dongle, and a program called rtl_433 which talks to 433MHz remote control things (among other frequencies). The purpose of this was to read the level of the oil tank sensor to keep track of the oil level. As it happens, while it's happily reading that, it's getting spammed by Toyota TPMS messages from the tyre pressure sensors on the car. That could be a way to detect car presence. although it would depend on the update rate - not much good if it's only every 10 minutes. I don't know if the TPMS message frequency changes if the wheel is rolling.

Theo

Dave Liquorice brought next idea :

They maybe would, if they were Amazon plugs. Several companies make them.

Those are what I am moving away from.

Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling,

won't be long now....but instead of a nuke it will be a virus....

Dave Plowman (News) has brought this to us :

It was a very impressive charger, of a type I have never come across before. It was built into the unit and once the battery hit a full charge, a relay would click and isolate it from the charger.