Neil Turner

Our 2025 Holiday: Llandudno & The Great Orme

by
A photo of Mostyn Street in Llandudno, looking towards the Great Orme

Directly north of Conwy, where we were staying, is Llandudno, a seaside resort that was largely developed in the mid 19th Century. Much of the land that Llandudno stands on was marshlands, owned by Lord Mostyn, and many of the buildings were planned and designed around the same time. As such, particularly along the seafront, there’s an aesthetically pleasing uniformity across the town.

Away from the seafront, the main street is Mostyn Street, and many shops have glass overhangs like those in Harrogate. However, it’s clear that the decline of the high street has affected Llandudno and I noticed a number of empty shops, including what looked like a large M&S. It turns out M&S merely moved to a new store a little further out of town, rather than leave the town entirely as it has done with Bradford, Hull and Huddersfield in recent years.

A photo of Llandudno pier

Llandudno Pier

Stretching out into the Irish Sea is the Grade II listed Llandudno Pier, dating from 1877. It’s the longest in Wales, and remains privately owned. It was also voted Pier of the Year this year, despite it recovering from damage from Storm Darragh at the end of last year. As piers go, there’s a decent mixture of shops – our nine-year-old particularly appreciated the Lego minifigures shop. At various times in its history, it’s been possible to catch ferry services from the far end of the pier, but no such services are currently running.

A photo of a sign welcoming people to the Great Orme country park

The Great Orme

The Great Orme is the name given to the headland to the north of Llandudno. As mentioned, Llandudno itself is former marshland and so is very flat, and mostly at sea level. Meanwhile, the Great Orme rises to a height of just over 200 metres and is a prominent feature on the landscape. Because it’s surrounded by low-lying land, the Great Orme feels like a mountain, but it isn’t – parts of the village of Queensbury, near Bradford, are twice as high for example. It would need to be around three times taller – 610 metres – to be considered a proper mountain.

Much of the Great Orme is owned by the National Trust, but it’s managed on a day-to-day basis by the local authority who operate the facilities there. In the Summit Complex, there’s a café and a shop; there also appeared to be a bar, but this was closed when we visited. There’s also a visitor centre with history about the Great Orme, including its lighthouse.

Across the Great Orme are plenty of sheep, and some Kashmir goats which are descended from a pair gifted to Queen Victoria. There’s also a species of shrub called the Wild Cotoneaster, which is critically endangered and only found on the Great Orme.

The Great Orme Mines

Inside the Great Orme are seams of malachite, a copper ore, mixed amongst the sandstone. These have been mined for over 4000 years, although mining activity ended in the late 19th Century. In 1987, ahead of the building of a new car park, an archaeological dig was ordered, and the mines were rediscovered. That car park never got built, as the dig is still ongoing, with part of it opened as the Great Orme Bronze Age Copper Mines.

The opening up of the mines changed our understanding of Bronze Age history; it was previously thought that bronze tools weren’t used in Britain until the arrival of the Romans. But tools were found in the mines, made using copper from the mine and tin imported from Cornwall.

Today, you can go into the first two levels of the mines, which go around 18 metres underground. This includes a huge cavern, which was excavated by hand and is now home to several stalagmites and stalactites. So far, nine levels have been excavated, with more likely to be found as the excavation continues. Our nine-year-old enjoyed it, and it was good to compare it with the 19th and 20th Century mines that we visited last year at Beamish and the National Coal Mining Museum for England.

The Great Orme tramway

There are a few ways up the Great Orme. If you’re feeling especially athletic, you can walk up, but it’s quite a steep climb. You can drive – there’s a car park at the summit – or catch a bus. Both standard public buses, and an open top minibus for tourists, run to the summit.

You can also travel by cable car, from just above the pier in Llandudno. But, for me, the best way up is on the Great Orme Tramway. Opened in 1902, this runs from Llandudno up to the summit, and is Britain’s last surviving cable-powered tramway. It’s actually two separate tramways; passengers have to alight at the halfway station to switch from one tram to the other. The halfway station, rebuilt in 2001, also doubles as the workshops, and there are large windows so that you can see the winding gear for the cables.

The tramcars are all original, although the 2001 upgrade did introduce some modern equipment. Whilst the tramcars were hauled using cables, they also previously used overhead cables for communication. The 2001 upgrade replaced this with a radio system, so whilst the tramcars retain short trolley poles at each end, they’re no longer used in service.

The lower section of the line runs along several streets, which is unusual for a cable-powered tramway. Both sections operate on the funicular principal, so as one tramcar goes up, another goes down. It’s mostly single track, with each section having a passing place in the middle.

Accessibility

Llandudno station is at the end of a short branch line from Llandudno Junction, and receives regular local services from Chester and Manchester. Less frequent services run to Cardiff; in the past, direct trains to London Euston have operated but not since 2008.

We parked at the Victoria Shopping Centre, which is central to the town and has a multi-storey car park. We didn’t need to charge our electric car there, but there are 12 Type 2 chargers offering up to 22 kW available, on the Roam network. As mentioned, there is also a car park at the top of the Great Orme.

The pier is all on one level. The Great Orme tramway has limited capacity for wheelchairs, which need to be folded whilst on board, and there are steps up to the tramcars.

How to disable go2rtc in Home Assistant

by

Home Assistant includes support for go2rtc, a streaming video application, which can be used to monitor and store footage from CCTV cameras. Since the November 2024 (2024.11) release of Home Assistant, go2rtc has been included in Home Assistant’s Default Config, which means that integration is loaded automatically on startup. If you don’t have any cameras to monitor in Home Assistant, this can mean some warnings appearing in your logs, and potentially slow Home Assistant down.

There are two ways to disable go2rtc if you don’t need it – a hard way and an easy way.

Hard way: Disable Home Assistant’s Default Config

You can tell Home Assistant not to load the Default Config. This gives you more control over which built-in integrations are loaded when you boot Home Assistant up, however, it means editing your configuration.yaml file. You’ll need to delete the ‘default_config:‘ line, and then create new entries for all the parts of the default configuration that you want to keep. This may be fine for simple installations, but for most users, this will add more complexity. I wouldn’t recommend this personally.

Easy way: Using HACS integrations

There are two HACS integrations that you need to install:

  1. Early Loader
  2. Default Config Exclude

These are not in the standard HACS repository, so you’ll need to open HACS, click on the three dots in the top right, select ‘Custom Repositories’ and then add the Github URLs in turn. You’ll need to install Early Loader first, restart Home Assistant, and then install Default Config Exclude next.

Once installed, you’ll still need to edit your configuration.yaml file, but instead you’ll only have to add a small block. Here’s mine:

default_config_exclude:
  - go2rtc
  - stream
  - cloud
  - my

What you’ll notice is that I’ve added some other integrations – stream, Home Assistant Cloud, and My Home Assistant. If you don’t have any cameras, then not only do you not need go2rtc, you probably don’t also need stream either. I don’t use Home Assistant Cloud or My Home Assistant, so I’ve disabled these too. As well as starting up a little quicker, Home Assistant also now uses slightly less RAM than before.

Our 2025 holiday: Conwy

by
A photo of Conwy castle taken through the gap in the town wall.

We’re back from our 2025 summer holiday in North Wales. Actually, we’ve been back a week now but it’s taken me a little time to sort the photos. I’ll be writing about the places we visited over the next couple of weeks, and today I’m starting with Conwy.

Situated on the North Wales coast, at the mouth of the Conwy Estuary, Conwy is a small town with a big castle. It retains its walls, which still run around almost all of the town and have only been breached in one location. Indeed, many stretches of wall are available to walk along.

Our rented cottage was just outside the walls, but was within walking distance.

A short history of Conwy

The town of Conwy was built by the English as a fortified town in the 13th Century. However, they weren’t the first people to occupy the site; in the 12th Century, some monks had founded an abbey there, known as Aberconwy Abbey. When the English, led by King Edward I, came along, they forced to monks to build a new abbey further up the Conwy Valley to the south. The castle was built first, followed by the town, and all use the same hard local stone. It’s probably due to the hardness of the stone, that the castle and walls have survived so long.

In the 14th Century, Welsh forces managed to seize the castle and the town, and held it for 3-4 months before negotiating a surrender. Inside the town, Aberconwy House was built around this time and remains the oldest surviving building within the town. It’s owned by the National Trust is open four days a week (Wednesday to Saturday) as a second-hand bookshop.

Whilst accessible by sea, it wasn’t until the 19th Century that road and rail access to Conwy became viable, and with it its rise as a tourist destination. In the late 20th Century, the whole town and castle became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The three bridges crossing the Conwy estuary, taken from one of the towers of Conwy Castle

Conwy bridges and tubes

The first bridge to be built across the Conwy Estuary was the Conwy Suspension Bridge, which will be 200 years old next year. It was designed by Thomas Telford, who was responsible for the first roads along the North Wales coast. The bridge still stands, albeit only open to foot traffic nowadays, and is managed by the National Trust. It’s open as a permissive footpath, so you don’t need to pay to cross it.

Telford’s suspension bridge is the world’s oldest surviving ‘modern’ suspension bridge. It could be seen as a dry run for another bridge that Telford designed, the Menai Bridge, further along the North Wales coast and spanning the Menai Strait between the British mainland and Anglesey.

Later on in the 19th Century, Robert Stephenson designed the Conwy Railway Bridge, which was built alongside Telford’s suspension bridge. This brought the North Wales Main Line railway to Conwy, on its way to Holyhead on Anglesey. This bridge is a tubular bridge – a pair of big metal girders, which were erected off site and lifted into place. Each hollow girder carries one of the two railway tracks. Stephenson also designed a tubular bridge to cross the Menai Strait, resulting in the Britannia Bridge. However, the Britannia Bridge was badly damaged in a fire in 1970, and was rebuilt to have two decks, with the railway below and the A55 North Wales Expressway up top.

By the 1950s, Telford’s suspension bridge was becoming a bottleneck, and so a third bridge was opened in 1958, the Pont Conwy (Conwy Bridge). I believe that it was at this point that a gap in Conwy’s walls was made to fit the wider road through. This is a much more plain, low-lying bridge that sits alongside Telford’s suspension bridge, to the north, with Stephenson’s tubular bridge to the south.

Whilst the Pont Conwy relieved one bottleneck, Conwy itself remained a pinch point for traffic heading to the port of Holyhead, where ferries go onwards to Ireland. The streets, and the gateways in the town’s walls are only wide enough for one lane of traffic, and to this day there’s a one-way system around the town. So, in the 1990s, the A55 North Wales Expressway was diverted into a tunnel, which runs under the Conwy Estuary. This was built using a (at the time) pioneering method of immersed tubes, buried in the riverbed. Nowadays, the A55 is all dual carriageway from Chester in England, through to Holyhead, apart from the Britannia Bridge. In fact, the road through Conwy and Colwyn Bay is a ‘secret motorway’, with motorway restrictions but standard green signs for a primary ‘A’ road.

A photo of the interior of Conwy Castle.

Conwy Castle

The castle and town walls are managed by Cadw, the Welsh counterpart to English Heritage. Whilst the walls are free to walk on, you’ll need to pay to enter the castle. There’s a shop and visitor centre next to the town’s main car park, and this leads to a bridge across the B5106 Llanwrst Road and into the castle. Originally, there would have been a set of steps and a drawbridge, but a mini roundabout sits where the steps were.

Since it was constructed in the 13th Century, it’s fallen into ruin and then been repaired several times, but it was taken out of military use in the 17th Century following the English Civil War, and later stripped of all of its iron and lead. It’s now a ruin, although a reasonably well-preserved one, and visitors can climb most of the towers and walk along the walls. The last major investment in 2012 saw the construction of the new visitor centre, new information boards and several sculptures installed.

As it’s a ruin, there’s not masses to see there, although I feel that Cadw have done a better job of presenting the castle than their English counterparts did at Warkworth Castle. You could probably spend 1-2 hours here, depending on how interested you are and how many steps you’re willing to climb.

Other things to see in Conwy

On the waterfront, there’s the Smallest House in Great Britain, as recognised by Guinness World Records. Our nine-year-old went in on their own – we didn’t, as you have to pay. There are various boat tours on offer, mainly up and down the Conwy Estuary.

As you’d expect from a town that has a reputation for tourism, there are plenty of small shops to look around. Opposite the castle is The Knight Shop, which as well as selling various imitation swords and armour, has a fantastic range of mead. Including sparking mead, which I’ve never previously come across. We bought a bottle to try later.

Accessibility

Conwy has a railway station, although it’s a request stop with short platforms and not all trains that pass through are scheduled to stop. That being said, it’s a relatively easy walk from the nearby Llandudno Junction station, which has more regular services.

There’s a small car park inside the town walls, but there’s a larger one off Llanwrst Road which is linked to the town by a foot tunnel under the railway. I’m not aware of any public electric car chargers in or around the town, but there’s a Tesco and a Lidl at Llandudno Junction that we used for charging. There are regular bus services, and an open-top tourist bus regularly runs between Conwy and Llandudno.

For the castle, it’s possible to enter the castle without needing to climb any steps, but once inside you won’t be able to go into any of the towers without using stairs. Cadw and English Heritage members get into the castle for free, and there are discounts for Blue Light card holders, and members of the armed forces. Foster families with a Max Card can also get a discount, but people with disabilities will need to show proof of receipt of DLA or similar.

Aaaaaaah, August again

by

Happy Yorkshire Day! Like last year, I will be starting the day at home in Yorkshire, however, we’re off down to the Midlands later today. We’ve only just come back from our holiday in Wales, but this time it’s for a family event. We’re celebrating a big number birthday for one of my cousins. And yes, we had a nice time in Wales.

August is also my busiest period at work. Results Day for A-level students is on the 14th this year, and as I work in university admissions, I’ll be exceptionally busy either side of that date. This includes some later finishes on weekdays, and Saturday working.

As such, there will be lots of blog posts written in advance that’ll be going live over the course of the month. Many of these will be what we did on our holiday in Wales, and I’m sure there’ll be more posts about our electric car as we get used to it.

Playlist of the month: Artists turned actors

by

Last July, the playlist of the month was actors turned artists, and so this month I’m flipping it around. This time, I’m offering 10 songs from artists who then went on to star in films once they were famous. As per usual, you can listen along on Spotify.

  • ‘Gotta Tell You’ by Samantha Mumba. Samantha Mumba was big news when her debut album came out in 2000. In 2002, she had a starring role in The Time Machine, loosely adapted from HG Wells’ novel.
  • ‘Popular’ by Ariana Grande. Whilst Ariana initially found fame on TV, she’s best known as a singer who has more recently moved into acting in films. This is from the Wicked (part one) soundtrack, where she was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actress.
  • ‘Magic Dance’ by David Bowie. Labyrinth wasn’t Bowie’s first film role, but it’s certainly his most well-known. At least, it is in the UK, where it performed far better at the box office than in the US, and exposed a whole generation of young people to Bowie’s crotch.
  • ‘Diamonds’ by Rihanna. Rihanna voices Smurfette in yet another upcoming Smurfs film, but she’s also known for starring in Ocean’s 8.
  • ‘Shallow’ by Lady Gaga (and Bradley Cooper). Lady Gaga was nominated for a Golden Globe award for her performance with Bradley Cooper in A Star Is Born, coming around a decade after her first single, Just Dance, was released. ‘Abracadabra’ is a big hit in our house.
  • ‘Obsessed’ by Mariah Carey. Carey’s film debut was in Glitter, which is apparently best forgotten about (I haven’t seen it), but she was lauded for her appearance in a more recent film, Precious.
  • ‘Work It Out’ by Beyoncé. This was actually Beyoncé’s debut solo single – not the more widely played Crazy In Love that followed a year later. It was released to promote the third Austin Powers film, Goldmember, where Beyoncé plays the supporting role of Foxxy Cleopatra. Later, she would also star in Dreamgirls, the Diana Ross/Supremes biopic.
  • ‘Spotlight’ by Jennifer Hudson. Speaking of Dreamgirls, Hudson was another singer-turned-actor who co-starred with Beyoncé in the film.
  • ‘Try Again’ by Aaliyah. Aaliyah’s acting debut was in the film Romeo Must Die alongside Jet Li. This song, as well as being one of her best known, was also released to promote the film. Sadly Aaliyah was killed in a plane crash a year later, in 2001.
  • ‘Believe’ by Cher. Cher has starred in a fair few films, alongside her singing career, and won an Oscar for her role in Moonstruck.

Home Assistant Green review

by
A photo of a plugged-in Home Assistant Green

Since I started using Home Assistant in October 2023, I’ve been running it on a Raspberry Pi 4, first in ‘Container’ mode and more recently in ‘Supervisor’ mode. I’ve now bought a Home Assistant Green, and I’m using this to run Home Assistant.

The Home Assistant Green is one of the two dedicated hardware platforms that come pre-installed with Home Assistant. The other, the Home Assistant Yellow, deserves its own section later on. By buying one of these devices, you’re also helping to financially support the Home Assistant project.

Why I bought a Home Assistant Green

As someone who has previously gone down the DIY route, it may seem surprising that I’ve decided to buy a Home Assistant Green. My decision came down to the following:

  • Price – the Home Assistant Green costs around £90 in the UK, which isn’t much more expensive than a bare bones Raspberry Pi 5. Once you’ve added a case, power supply and SSD to a Raspberry Pi, the Home Assistant Green is actually cheaper.
  • Cheap to run – I had considered some kind of mini PC, which would offer me more power, but with both a higher upfront cost and ongoing electricity cost. The Home Assistant Green runs on up to three watts; it comes with a 12 volt, one amp barrel plug power supply. As it’ll be on all the time, I don’t want a power-hungry device.
  • The need for a dedicated Home Assistant device. In May, it was announced that the ‘Supervised’ install method would be deprecated along with ‘Core’; only a tiny fraction of people use these methods. This dovetailed with me wanting a dedicated device for Home Assistant, rather than trying to run it on the same little Raspberry Pi as Plex and some other services. In other words, I was in the market for an additional device to run Home Assistant, and the Home Assistant Green fitted the bill. Meanwhile, my Raspberry Pi 4 can be dedicated to Plex.
  • No longer needing to worry about compatibility. According to Home Assistant Analytics, over a third of people install Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi and so I don’t expect it to become unsupported. However, as the Home Assistant Green is the closest thing to ‘official’ hardware, I know it’ll be well-supported in future releases. As I’m coming to rely on Home Assistant more, I need it to run on a reliable platform.

What the Home Assistant Green can’t do

Coming from a Raspberry Pi, it’s worth noting what features the Home Assistant Green lacks. These include:

The Home Assistant Green does have two standard USB-A ports for you to plug in dongles and hubs, so I have my Thread and Zigbee dongles connected. Not having Wi-Fi or Bluetooth on board may reduce interference on the 2.4 GHz band, I suppose.

The box that the Home Assistant Green comes in

Home Assistant Green hardware

The Home Assistant Green is actually bigger and heavier than I expected it to be – certainly, it’s larger than a Raspberry Pi. It has a very sturdy base, which is designed to act as a heat sink – it’s passively cooled so there’s no fan noise. Inside, there’s a quad-core 1.8 GHz ARM processor, placing it between the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 in terms of computing power. There’s 4 GB of RAM, and storage comes courtesy of a 32 GB eMMC (embedded multimedia card).

You’ll also get an AC adaptor with a variety of plugs (including a UK 3 pin plug) and an Ethernet cable.

Optionally, you can install a CR2032 battery inside. It doesn’t come with one, but if you add a CR2032 battery then the system clock will remember the time between reboots. It’s mostly only needed if you’re using it somewhere with poor or no internet access, as otherwise the clock synchronises with the internet on startup.

There’s also an HDMI port and a slot for a micro-SD card, but these are only for system recovery purposes and not for general use.

I would tell you more about how it is to use, but to be honest, it’s just like using Home Assistant on any other platform. All I had to do was restore a backup from my Raspberry Pi 4, and I was up and running.

Home Assistant Yellow

If the Home Assistant Green doesn’t meet your requirements, consider the Home Assistant Yellow. It’s more advanced and upgradeable, but also requires some assembly as it ships without a logic board. That’s provided by a Raspberry Pi Compute Module, the idea being that you can upgrade this incrementally over time without needed to buy a whole new device. It’s a nice idea, but it also adds to the cost – the base Home Assistant Yellow costs around £120 with the Compute Module adding £30-40 on top, and it arrives in kit form rather than pre-assembled. However, long term, it could be cheaper due to it being upgradeable.

There are other differences: The Home Assistant Yellow is available with Power over Ethernet (PoE), meaning that it doesn’t need a separate power supply. However, you’ll need a router or a switch which supports this. If you don’t, then you can buy a Home Assistant Yellow with an AC adaptor.

The Home Assistant Yellow also has an 802.16 radio, meaning that it can support Zigbee devices without an extra dongle. This can also be re-programmed to support Thread, but not both Thread and Zigbee at the same time. Additionally, there’s a 3.5mm audio port, and inside, there’s an expansion port for installing an SSD if you need one.

Whilst I have the technical knowledge to get a Home Assistant Yellow up and running, once you’ve factored in everything, it costs about double the price of a Home Assistant Green.

Nanoleaf Matter Essentials LED Bulb review

by
A photo of the Nanoleaf Matter Essentials B22 LED Bulb in a light fitting

I’ve bought myself a Nanoleaf Matter/Thread Essentials LED bulb (sponsored link) to use with another PIR motion sensor (see my review of that from a couple of weeks ago). Unlike last time, this is a Matter over Thread bulb, rather than a Zigbee bulb.

Whilst many of the smart home products I have bought recently have been Zigbee devices, I’m reasonably convinced that Matter and Thread are the future of home automation. To date, I’ve only picked up Matter smart plugs – some Meross Wi-Fi plugs and some Onvis Thread plugs – so this is the first Matter bulb that I’ve bought.

Connecting over Matter

This Nanoleaf Essentials bulb connects over Thread, rather than Wi-Fi. This is probably why there is a ‘Frequently returned item’ warning on the Amazon listing, as it won’t work well without a Thread Border Router. Thankfully, I have three – two Google Wi-Fi devices, and my Home Assistant instance with a USB dongle. Like Zigbee, Thread is a mesh network, and so these three border routers, and my two Onvis plugs have formed a relatively good Thread mesh. That’s good, because this bulb is in a room on its own some distance from any of the border routers, but it’s able to join the mesh with the Onvis plugs.

As it’s a Matter device, I was able to add it to Home Assistant, Google Home and Apple Home with no issues. Nanoleaf include the necessary QR code on the instruction manual as well as the bulb itself, which is helpful. The bulb also supports Bluetooth, partly for commissioning onto the Thread network, but it can also be controlled by Bluetooth using the Nanoleaf app if you don’t have a Thread Border Router. However, due to Bluetooth’s short range, I doubt this will be much use to many people.

Appearance and usage

The design of the bulb is a little odd. Unlike most LED bulbs, it’s not a smooth spherical surface, but a series of blocky geometric shapes. I’d prefer a smooth look, personally.

The bulb was quite responsive when using it with Google Home. It’s a colour changing and dimming model, and when it turns on and off, it fades up or down, which is a nice touch. I found controlling it with Home Assistant a little more hit and miss – sometimes, turning it on took a few seconds, but other times it was instant. I’ll need to look into why that is.

Cost

The thing that mainly drew me to this bulb is its price – literally just five of your Great British Pounds. That’s not quite as cheap as the £4.33 Zigbee bulb that I previously bought from AliExpress, but as it’s from Amazon, I didn’t have to wait a week for shipping. And as it’s a Matter bulb, it’s better supported by Google and Apple. I just wish it was a little less ugly, but at £5, you can’t really argue.

Tasmota firmware upgrade failing due to lack of storage space

by
A screenshot of the Tasmota firmware upgrade screen on the web interface

Once you’ve switched your ESP devices from the stock proprietary firmware to Tasmota, the good news is that future firmware upgrades to newer Tasmota versions should be straightforward. You just need to open your device’s web interface, and do an over-the-air (OTA) upgrade, or use something like TasmoAdmin to bulk-upgrade multiple devices. At least, that’s how it works in theory.

What you may find is that the update fails, due to a lack of storage space. So today, I’m going to outline four possible workarounds that you could try if your Tasmota firmware upgrades fail.

Why is there a lack of storage space?

Firstly, a bit about why this happens. You’re most likely to encounter this error with devices that use the ESP8266 chip. Some of these chips come with as little as one single megabyte of flash memory storage, and the standard build of Tasmota is 656 kilobytes (as of version 15.0.1 which is the latest at the time of writing). There simply isn’t enough space for both the current firmware and the new firmware to sit side-by-side ahead of the update process.

Now that we understand why the problem occurs, we can try some solutions.

Solution 1: gzipped binaries

As long as you’re upgrading from a version newer than Tasmota 8.2 (which came out over five years ago now), you can use the smaller gzipped binaries. This reduces the standard Tasmota 15.0.1 release binary down to 469 kilobytes.

However, on some of my devices, that was still too big – 656 plus 469 is more than 1024 kilobytes and exceeds the capacity of the 1 MB flash storage.

Solution 2: install tasmota-minimal first

There are a couple of slimmed down versions of Tasmota:

  • tasmota-lite – a cut-down version of Tasmota without many of the sensors or drivers included
  • tasmota-minimal – the bare-minimum of Tasmota which can’t do anything apart from be upgraded to the full firmware

What you can do is install the latest version of tasmota-minimal first, and then the latest standard version of Tasmota. tasmota-minimal is only 265 kilobytes, and so it’s small enough to fit alongside the standard firmware. Once installed, there’s then space for the full version to be installed.

When you do an OTA upgrade, this is the process that should happen – tasmota-minimal gets installed first, and then the full version. But if it doesn’t, you can do this manually yourself. Your device settings, such as the GPIO mappings and MQTT settings, will be retained during the process.

Solution 3: tethered firmware update

A tethered update is where you use another device, such as a PC, to update the firmware. This means physically connecting the device to the PC. It gets around the storage limitation as the firmware doesn’t need to be downloaded to the device running Tasmota first.

How easy this will be will depend on the device, and where it is. If you’re running Tasmota on a development board, such as a Wemos D1 or m5stack Atom, then you can plug in into your PC with a standard USB cable (as long as it’s a data and power cable). However, if your device is buried away somewhere inaccessible, or is a consumer device that requires disassembly and a USB to UART converter, then you may not want to do this every time a new version is released.

Solution 4: Compile Tasmota yourself

The standard builds of Tasmota cover most common use cases. However, as Tasmota is open source, you can compile it yourself. That way, you can create a smaller, customised build for your device that doesn’t include any extra functions that aren’t needed. There are tools available to do this, but this is really only for advanced users – especially as you’ll need to recompile the binaries for each release.

Solution 5: Switch to a different firmware

As I mentioned last month, Tasmota is not the only game in town. If you also use Home Assistant, then consider replacing Tasmota with ESPHome.

ESPHome has a higher learning curve, due to its use of YAML configuration files. But, once this is set up, it’s easier to compile new binaries each time a new version of ESPHome is released. And, if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to download a pre-built YAML file from the ESPHome Device Repository. Just be aware that it’s not as extensive as the Tasmota Supported Devices Repository – the ESPHome repository has details of around 600 devices compared to almost 3000 for Tasmota. I wasn’t able to find an exact match for ESPHome for my smart plugs, for example.

ESPHome has some other advantages. For example, you can edit the YAML configuration to tell Home Assistant what type of device is plugged in, say a light. That means it’ll appear in Home Assistant as a light, rather than a switch, without needing to use the Change device type of a switch helper.

As with solution four, having a smaller firmware binary will make future OTA updates easier, and these updates can be managed through Home Assistant.

TasmoAdmin: manage multiple Tasmota devices

by
A screenshot of the TasmoAdmin interface

Now that I have multiple Tasmota devices, I went to look for a tool to manage them collectively, and found TasmoAdmin. It’s a web-based app that can monitor the status of your Tasmota devices.

The easiest way to install it is with Docker, and it’s also available as a Home Assistant addon. You can also install it manually on an existing local web server with PHP available. Once installed, you’ll need to create a user account, and then you can start adding your devices by IP address.

Once all your devices are in there, you’ll get a nice list, with their IP address and their current version of the Tasmota firmware. You can then jump quickly into the standard Tasmota configuration for your device, but you can also configure many settings from within the TasmoAdmin interface. This includes things like the MQTT and Wi-Fi settings.

You can also use TasmoAdmin to perform bulk actions on multiple devices at once. For example, you can trigger backups or firmware updates in bulk. The ‘Start’ page in TasmoAdmin also lets you, for example, turn all of your switches on or off at once.

It’s a handy tool. Bear in mind that if you run TasmoAdmin as a Home Assistant addon, it doesn’t currently support ‘ingress’ and so you can’t open it within the Home Assistant interface. This also means that you might not be able to access the dashboard remotely. TasmoAdmin may also work with OpenBeken devices, but I haven’t tried this myself.

Our 2018 summer holiday in the Loire

by
A small train plodding around the Parc Floral de la Source

Last summer, I blogged about previous un-blogged holidays in 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023. As I’m away on this year’s holiday at present, I’m going to write about our 2018 holiday. Although our holiday fell before my blogging hiatus, it only got a brief mention at the time.

This particular holiday was our nine-year-old’s first trip outside England, although as it was seven years ago they were two at the time, as that’s how maths works. Nominally, our holiday was in the Loire valley in France – yes, the same place as 2023 – but we fitted some other places in too.

A photo of the outside of the Cadbury's Factory in Bourneville, West Midlands

Cadbury World

I suppose our holiday ‘started’ in the West Midlands, at Cadbury World. This was one of several places that we called at on our journey down. I’d been before with Hari – her family is from Worcestershire – but this was the first time we’d been as a family.

Cadbury World is adjacent to the Cadbury’s factory in Bourneville, a model village built by Cadbury’s for its workers that now forms a suburb of Birmingham. It tells the story about Cadbury’s – the history of the company and how chocolate is made. So whilst it’s a museum, it’s also very much a tourist attraction, with indoor rides and a chance to watch professionals make chocolate. During my earlier visit in the 2000s, you were able to see some of the actual Cadbury production lines in the factory, but I don’t remember seeing them on this visit.

It’s not quite a full day out, which suited us as we’d arrived there having set off from home – it was over two hours’ drive, and we had further to go afterwards. The attraction is run by Merlin (the Alton Towers and Sealife Centre people) so whilst it can be quite pricey, there are various discounts available if you can book in advance.

We stayed overnight near Oxford, where we met up with my parents and had a meal for Father’s Day.

A photo of a tall sailing ship called HMS Warrior at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard

Portsmouth Historic Dockyard

As per usual, we entered France by ferry from Portsmouth. Having driven down from Oxford in plenty of time, we spent the afternoon visit the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, home to a museum and various boats such as HMS Warrior (pictured) and HMS Victory. The museum is huge, and is actually split across three sites with a shuttle boat between them. We were only there for the afternoon, and so we only saw about half of the museum. It’s also home to the wreck of the Mary Rose – again, we didn’t have time to see it.

We did, however, have a late evening stroll around Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth.

Our ferry was the overnight Portsmouth to Ouistreham (for Caen) service. In subsequent years, we’ve taken the longer Portsmouth to St Malo service, which leaves earlier and arrives later, giving you a better night’s sleep. The Caen ferry leaves Portsmouth at 11pm UK time, and arrives at 7:30am French time (6:30am UK time). I wouldn’t recommend it, especially if you then have to drive once you’ve arrived.

Photo of the Chateau de Blois

Blois

We called briefly in Blois on the way to our campsite to have some lunch. It’s a city with a large, well-preserved château in the centre – bits of the château date as early as the 13th Century, but it was substantially complete by the 17th Century. We had a quick look around, but didn’t go in.

A photo of Chateau de Chambord, a massive French castle.

Château de Chambord

One thing the Loire is not short of is châteaux, and Chambord is the chonkiest. It’s an absolute unit.

It was built in the 16th Century as a hunting lodge, and so as you would expect, the surrounding parkland is huge. Following the French Revolution in the 18th Century, it was abandoned with its furnishings removed. During the Second World War, it was used to store works of art normally displayed in the Louvre in Paris, and later on the 20th Century it was restored and opened to the public.

Inside, many of the rooms remain unfurnished. Most notable is a double spiral staircase.

Zoo Parc de Beauval

As mentioned, we stayed in the same area in 2023 and made a return visit to this zoo, so I won’t go into much detail here. It’s a fantastic zoo and arguably one of the best in the world.

A photo of Château de Chenonceau which spans the River Cher in France

Château de Chenonceau

Chenonceau is the château that is also a bridge, spanning the River Cher (which then flows into the Loire further downstream). You can indeed hire a rowing boat to go under the château, should you wish – we didn’t. And whilst it spans both sides of the river, you can’t exit on the other side.

Most of the ch̢teau dates from the 16th Century. In the 20th Century, the ch̢teau had roles in both World Wars Рin the first, it was used a hospital, and for a time during the second, it was a way to smuggle people out of occupied France. It was then occupied by the Nazis, leading to the Allies bombing it in 1944. Thankfully, it was restored in the 1950s and remains one of the most popular Loire ch̢teaux for visitors.

A photo of the Parc Floral de la Source near Orleans

Parc Floral de la Source

This was somewhere that we hadn’t originally planned to visit ahead of time, but decided to visit on a whim. And it was lovely.

It’s a huge garden, with several different themed areas. Indeed, it’s big enough for there to be a little train that runs around the park – we saw it running (and it’s the header image of this post) but it was only open to a pre-booked school group. As well as a wide variety of plants and trees, there are animals too – some birds, a butterfly house, and some farm animals. I think we spent most of the day here, before we hit Auchan in nearby Orleans – Christine’s first time in giant a French hypermarket.

A photo of Le Mont-Saint-Michel, an island accessed by a causeway

Le Mont-Saint-Michel

On the way back now, and we called off at Le Mont-Saint-Michel. It’s a small island, accessed via a causeway from the mainland, and it’s very photogenic. I’ve been before, and on a previous visit you could park your car on the causeway and then walk up. Nowadays, you park on the mainland, and a double-ended shuttle bus takes you across the causeway.

As well as the abbey at the top, there are lots of little windy streets selling everything a tourist could want. Indeed, it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the most-visited bit of France outside of Paris.

The bandstand at Matlock

Matlock

Back across the channel now, and we called in at Matlock in Derbyshire for a couple of hours on the way home. It’s a picturesque inland spa town on the edge of the Peak District, and we had a wander around the town and the park. Nearby is the Heights of Abraham – we didn’t go, but it’s on my long list of places to visit in future.