Ok, Before anyone says anything, I received a package in the mail this morning that I have been waiting for for a long time from Wrap-it-Solutions. No, they are not sponsoring this – they just sent me the kit – no strings attached.
DHL flu
Skip straight to “The Gear…” if you don’t want to read my “DHL Grip”. This was awarded because DHL – which is the new world transport police, delivered locally last week – but did not hand over the package until I paid the duty. The explanation that I didn’t pay anything didn’t do anything for me – so finding out that I would get the duty back from the company, I offered to pay the delivery driver (radicourier who does the “last mile”) with a bank card there and then. “Sorry, I can’t take cards”. I checked and he definitely had my package – but no – I didn’t have 45 euros in cash with me (I have no idea at this point why customs would be so high – see lead image). And delivery drivers insist on CASH – REALLY??
So he went back to base with my package. I called DHL and asked why I have to pay customs on a free sample. They had nothing but excuses. They offered to get the package back to me if I paid online. I paid immediately – “Instant Transfer” – mid-Friday afternoon and contacted DHL – now they had my money, they were in no rush to help. I heard nothing back from that point until this morning (Tuesday 22 September 2026) – but at midnight I got into the local delivery point in town – and there it was.
Update – and note that I missed the main device “Wrap” from the caption image – included below. The whole package usually costs 99 euros minus the small ultrasonic sensor and the BME280 – plus the additional charge from DHL (depending on where you live of course) apparently covers insurance, import taxes and duties. I asked and Rohan from Wrapit-solutions commented back “It’s a wonder anyone imports stuff. Governments make a fortune from cross-border trade.” and I agree with him 100%. Shocking. Now if Spain could do these things themselves competitively – I might see some logic, but they can’t and they won’t.
OH and 20 euros of that charge is, it seems, nothing more than DHL processing – for WHAT?
The equipment and where it comes from
And here it is – all the way to sunny Spain from Wrapit Solutions in Bali, Indonesia. Testing took place in Jakarta, Indonesia. Manufactured in China of course. What I don’t know about Jakarta would fill several books. I’ve been talking to Rohan and Steve and I’m really excited that someone in their part of the world is actually reading my blog.
After all, what I seem to have is one Raspberry Pi Zero 2 Wabout which I also know very little, although I know a lot about the original Raspberry Pi W and similar – and I started my IoT blogging with Arduino boards and Raspberry Pi 2 up to Raspberry Pi 5 before moving to mini computers (and of course ESP8266 and ESP32 – more on that elsewhere in the blogunch – I just got e532 bC? WiFi for that). So, a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W in a very nice Perspex case, I also have some real Raspberry Pi power supplies, a USB-C to micro USB adapter, one of those four-pin ultrasonic sensors, a practical lead, and a BME280 temperature, humidity and (I think) pressure sensor.
I received a small piece of paper with links to hub setup instructions, an email support, and a QR code. I won’t go through the whole unpacking…you’ve seen it all before. Suffice it to say that everything WELL is packed with a minimum of plastic.
HOLD THE PHONE… I almost forgot the star of the show: the Wrap it up from Wrapit-Solutions, a neat ESP12F, i.e. ESP8266 Control Board with lots of terminals. This should look familiar to me as years ago I designed something like this – I don’t make PCBs these days because my office is a bit small for that. Anyway, let’s not jump ahead because I don’t really know what this board does yet. Let’s see..
Crumbs – this brings back memories – any regular blog readers remember the picture below? – I made the little ESP8266 board below – a long time ago and resurrected it in 2025 as a broadband tester with extracts – but I’m going off on a tangent. I’ll stop now.
Sorry about the wording on the wrappa board image above – I had ChatGPT off my desk and sometimes (like me) it goes off on tangents. The wording under the links on the top right says “Relay”, “Filter” and “WDE”. To be fair, the Perspex cover probably didn’t help visibility. Strangely the relay max AC voltage is 60v for global certification reasons – never stopped the Chinese – mine will have a 230v light attached when I start playing – it says 250v on top of the relay.
For now since this is getting long, instead of keeping you stuck while I learn, there are instructions in the pictures above for setup. I’m excited to have a new general purpose board to play with and as for the wrapit hub (OOOH it came with a 32GB Sandisk microSD – I didn’t see that before)… that sounds interesting – and 2 decent power supplies to boot everything in the box.
Later though, check out Wrapit’s website – in time I will.
Day 2
Being me, I couldn’t even wait to go to the website for instructions, so I plugged the WRAPPA board into USB-C on my PC and messed with my phone’s WIFI settings – it came up with “wrapit aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff” (actually it showed the MAC address of the board instead of aa:bb: etc). As I had hoped, selecting then clicking on that SSID and selecting “Manage Router” took me straight to a page to assign the unit an SSID and password on my network. Ss a name – I thought WRAPPA would do for beginners as I only have the one board. It turns out that the address of that router was 192.168.4.2 – remember the setting of Tasmota and so setting up the SSID and forwarding my network was very familiar to me. However, once set up, one of these took me anywhere in a browser on my PC… .lan .local
So I went hunting on my router for any unknown or simple ESPRESSIF devices – nothing – at least no websites on port 80. Time to go online and read the instructions … took me to this setup video – so easy, I won’t reinvent the wheel – but just give you the link – In fact, I had successfully added the WRAPPA board to my network.
Next I decided to do the same setup with the hub – and even though the base address was different at 10.0.0.1 – added the small Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Board in my network was just as easy – and once on – the hub already knew about the WRAPPA board but here’s the thing – the setup was done at 192.168.xx:8080/ui – does that sound familiar? Yes, they have NODE-RED and it runs UI on this little one Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.
To continue…