Editor’s Note - Happy Holidays!

Reader,

Hello! I’m Brent. I am an engineer who works for Adafruit Industries on all kinds of things, including the newsletter you’re reading now.

This newsletter is distributed only once per month, giving me enough time to gather information from around the internet for you. This isn’t an industry newsletter, nor a newsletter covering every single project or news item. Instead, it’s a collection of projects and news that I find genuinely interesting. If you have feedback for improving this newsletter, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to make it better. Please email us at iotnews @ adafruit.com (remove the spaces!).

As a tradition, I typically write a newsletter that recaps my favorite things from the previous year. This issue lets me reflect on the past year and share with you some of the interesting projects and news that I’ve come across.

I’d also like to extend a “hug report” (Adafruit parlance for “thank you”) to our copyeditor, Anne, for her behind-the-scenes editing work on these newsletters for the past 5 years.

I hope the rest of your holiday season is wonderful, and I look forward to sharing more IoT news with you in the coming year,

Brent

p.s. Quick plug: We wrote a shopping guide! This newsletter is brought to you for free (no spam and we are 100% supported by you, the customer). We’ve asked our team of engineers/designers/developers who work on our free IoT Platform, Adafruit IO, to round up their favorite products on the Adafruit Shop for the holiday season.

2025 IoT Projects, in Recap

Holiday IoT Switch

This project was in the February 2025 newsletter. It did not make it into the IOT Monthly in time for the holidays but, fear not, I’m bringing it back for this issue. This switch uses a massive 10mm diameter arcade button to wirelessly send a message to a smart outlet to turn on the holiday lighting. - Adafruit Learning System

Engineering for Slow Internet in Antarctica

While working in Antarctica, brr “had access to the Internet only through an extremely limited series of satellite links provided by the United States Antarctic Program”. Modern websites often load up to 20 MB of Javascript, which makes connecting to the Internet in Antarctica a challenge. Brr’s exploration into engineering a faster, slow, internet is detailed in their blog post. - brr

Rain Sensing Umbrella Stand

A simple, compact umbrella stand that reads the weather forecast and lights up to notify you if rain is expected that day. - Adafruit Learning System

An $8 smart outlet to avoid brainrot

Neil Chen used an $8 smart outlet to avoid “brain rot”. When plugged in, a script blocks websites like X, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit, allowing him to focus and not get distracted by the Internet. - Neil Chen

ChatGPT for Rotary Phones

Pollux Labs transformed a rotary phone into a novel way to interface with ChatGPT. Dialing “1” will activate OpenAI’s Whisper API. The phone interacts with you through its handset. - hackster.io

2025 IoT News, in Recap

Arduino and Edge Impulse Join Qualcomm Technologies

Qualcomm Technologies acquired embedded ML platform Edge Impulse and open-source hardware company Arduino in 2025.

A Block-based Action Engine comes to Adafruit.IO

In Adafruit IO, Actions are a way to do something when a certain situation occurs. We’ve integrated Blockly within Adafruit IO to allow easy creation and editing of Actions on Adafruit IO. 2025 brought this new feature to life, along with lots of new projects to demonstrate its capabilities.

The Humane AI Pin Saga

The main story in February 2025 was the demise of Humane’s AI pin. This has been a poor rollout for one of the first consumer-focused AIoT hardware. After a large number of bad reviews spelled danger for the AI Pin - reports of units being returned more than they are sold and battery fire concerns made headlines. This all culminated in HP acquiring Humane in February for $116 million. As part of the acquisition, AI Pins stopped functioning on February 28, 2025. If you own one of these $699 devices, there is still hope! A recent WIRED article details a group working to keep the devices online.

IoT Projects

Listen to Wi-Fi data, just like the dial-up days!

AOL recently disconnected their dial-up service. Nick Bild said he “felt sad” about the “end of an era”. He built a project to capture Wi-Fi data and convert it to audible signals. While dial-up was sending analog signals (audio), this project mimics this by modulating the digital Wi-Fi packets into audible noises and plays it back through a speaker. The link past the break has a great write-up about how Nick got this fun project working. - HackaDay

Mini UPS for your Wi-Fi Router

A simple UPS (uninterruptible power supply) built out of low-cost parts to keep a WiFi router online during a short power outage or spike. - HackaDay.io

Rugged LoRa Repeater for Off-Grid Communications

While increasing the LoRa (Long Range) radio communication output’s power is illegal, Bertrand Selva developed a repeater to broadcast signals over extremely long distances. The repeater is “ultra-discreet”, uses low-cost materials (D batteries, standard PVD pipe fittings), and can run over five years in an off-grid location. - HackaDay.io

My fan worked fine, so I gave it WiFi

Ellis Clayton designed a fully reversible modification for a Vornado 633DC fan to control it remotely over WiFi. The final result is concealed entirely within the fan’s housing, leaving no visible modification. - Adafruit Blog

Pool Party Notifier

Build an internet-connected pool notifier to alert the neighborhood that your pool party is underway! When your pool is ready for guests, press a button on a web dashboard to send the flag up. We’ve also designed a 3D-printed enclosure to house the project. - Adafruit Learning System

ESP-NOW LED Juggling Balls

Interactive, wireless musical LED juggling balls using the low latency ESP-NOW protocol. The juggling balls can wirelessly trigger MIDI notes based on catch detection with an accelerometer, and bridge messages to your computer or USB Host synthesizer. - Adafruit Learning System

IoT News and More!

Nest Gen1/Gen2 Get a New Lease on Life

Breathing new life into bricked and outdated Nest Generation 1 & 2 thermostats, this project replaces the proprietary Google firmware with open-source firmware, allowing users to regain control over their devices. This firmware is also completely decoupled from Google’s servers and services. - GitHub

Ikea Launches New Smart Home Product Line

No more ZigBee hubs for IKEA smart homes! IKEA is finally launching 21 new smart home products — all built to work with the Matter standard. - IKEA

Raspberry Pi Unveils the $18 Compute Module RP3

Low-cost castellated “stamp” style module borrows the RP3 from the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and puts it in a new form factor for Chinese customers. - Hackster

IoT Projects

No-Code Indoor Grow Monitor with PPFD and VPD Measurements

With temperatures falling in New England, the basil and heirloom tomatoes that you have been growing in your garden to top your dinner with are moving back inside the house for winter. But will they still grow?

I built this IoT project with the Ruiz Brothers this past month to calculate a plant’s photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD) and vapor pressure deficit (VPD). Knowing these data points can help optimize the yield of indoor crops. - Adafruit Learning System

How to Interpret Environmental Sensor Data With Local “Edge” LLMs

Tim documents his experiments with using a small (but local) Large Language Model, running on a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB, to provide insights into data collected by an environmental sensor. - Adafruit Learning System

SplashFlag - Building an IoT Swimming Notification Device from Scratch

Bert wanted to build an IoT device from scratch and selected “something fun” to try it out. He built a device that alerts his neighbors when his kids go swimming, extending an invitation for their kids to join them. - Data with Bert

Hosting a Website on a Disposable Vape

Bogdan Ionescu had been collecting disposable vapes from friends and family and noticed they all had a tiny ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller inside. Why not run a web server on one? - bogdanthegeek

Turning a Billy Bass into a Voice Assistant

Keen on Tech turned a Billy Bass animatronic fish into a voice assistant. The first few seconds of the video demonstrates the fish moving its head and responding to a “Hey Billy” command in a hilarious manner. - HackADay

DIY Indoor Air Quality Monitor with Separate Display

This step‑by‑step guide will walk you through building a fully functional indoor air quality monitor. You’ll learn how to capture real‑time measurements — such as temperature, humidity, and particulate matter — and automatically send that data to an external display for easy viewing. The project also leverages Adafruit’s WipperSnapper firmware and Adafruit IO Actions, allowing you to set up powerful data collection, visualization, and automation features without writing a single line of code. - Adafruit Learning System

IoT News and More!

A New Chapter for Arduino with Qualcomm

Starting with the largest piece of news, Arduino has been acquired by Qualcomm for an undisclosed amount. This is a big deal for the maker community, Arduino has been a staple in DIY electronics and Open Source for years.

As part of this announcement, Arduino released a new board. The Uno Q has a Qualcomm Dragonwing microprocessor and a STM32U585 microcontroller. This board with a “dual brain design” is designed for advanced IoT applications that leverage Edge Impulse’s ML/AI platform (also recently acquired by Qualcomm).

The official press announcement is on the Arduino Blog, and our team has a post up about this on our blog.

ESP32 Bus Pirate

ESP32 Bus Pirate is an open-source firmware that turns your ESP32-S3 device into a multi-protocol hacker’s tool, inspired by the legendary Bus Pirate. - Adafruit Blog

Logitech POP Buttons Get Deprecated

A day after this newsletter hits your inbox, Logitech will shut down their services for users of the $100 USD POP Smart Button Kit. Logitech claims that these buttons will “lose all functionality” after the services are gone. - HackADay

IoT Projects

Streaming Audio over Bluetooth Low Energy from a Raspberry Pi

Thanks to recent advancements in BlueZ (the Linux Bluetooth stack), AK Experiments decided to try streaming audio over Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) using a Raspberry Pi. - AK Experiments

Engineering for Slow Internet in Antarctica

While working in Antarctica, brr “had access to the Internet only through an extremely limited series of satellite links provided by the United States Antarctic Program”. Modern websites often load up to 20 MB of Javascript, which makes connecting to the Internet in Antarctica a challenge. Brr’s exploration into engineering a faster, slow, internet is detailed in their blog post. - brr

Universal Sensors for Home Assistant

Two totally different options for a building sensor to communicate with Home Assistant. - GitHub

IoT News and More!

WiFi signals can measure heart rate

Researchers at UC Santa Cruz developed Pulse-Fi, technology that uses WiFi signals to measure a person’s heart rate. Pulse-Fi appears to be highly accurate, with clinical-grade accuracy. This system is unique because it does not require any wearable devices. - UC Santa Cruz

u-blox Sells for $1.3bn to Private Equity Firm

After exiting the cellular space this year, connectivity module manufacturer u-blox has been sold to Advent for $1.3bn. - RCRWirelessNews

Dual-Antenna Boards by Unexpected Maker

We got these unique new boards from Unexpected Maker in the shop last month. This is a very niche product to stock, hence why I’m including it in this newsletter. What makes them unique is these boards have both an antenna AND an u.FL connector for an external antenna, on the same board. You can switch which antenna to use via the RF switch on the fly from your code. These are perfect if you want to test different antenna variations while in the prototyping phase of a project, before you commit to a final design. - Adafruit Blog

KittenTTS is a state-of-the-art TTS model under 25MB

Kitten TTS is a new open-source realistic text-to-speech model with just 15 million parameters, designed for lightweight deployment and high-quality voice synthesis. Under 25MB and CPU optimization means its perfect for electronics projects. - Adafruit Blog

IoT Projects

Rain Sensing Umbrella Stand

A compact sized umbrella stand that lights up to warn you of incoming rainstorms. - Adafruit Learning System

Using ESP-NOW with CircuitPython

ESP-NOW is a connectionless communication protocol developed by Espressif that allows ESP32/ESP8266 devices to communicate directly with each other without needing a WiFi router or access point. It’s great for props, sensor-networks, remote controls, and mesh communications. Instead of spending spin-up and development time to see if ESP-NOW is the right fit for a project you’re working on, CircuitPython exposes an ESP-Now library that makes getting started super easy. - Adafruit Learning System

Ocean Sensor

An open-source buoy that monitors turbidity off the coast of Maui, Hawaii. The design is incredibly low-cost and uses an IMU sensor to read ocean waves. To do this, the author used ChatGPT to develop an Edge Impulse model for identifying wave height. Instructables

IoT News and More!

Ikea Relaunches Entire Smart Home Product Line

Ikea is re-launching its smart home product line. Smart devices will use the Matter-Over-Thread standard instead of Zigbee. The smart audio product line is also re-launching with inexpensive Bluetooth and Spotify, rather than Sonos. - The Verge

Belkin Bricks Wemo Smart Plugs

Belkin is ending support for Wemo smart plugs in 2026. The plugs will not be controllable via the Wemo app or the Internet. While Belkin is also offering a partial refund for this product line, I [the author of this newsletter] feel for the many users who have invested in these plugs for their home. I am not sure if a partial refund is “fair compensation” for effectively bricking a product that’s physically installed in a home unless the partial refund can cover a replacement for its functionality. Belkin Support

Espressif RainMaker MCP Server

ESP RainMaker now supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling natural language interactions with your IoT devices via tools like Claude, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, etc. - Espressif Developer Portal

Insights on Teufel’s Open-Source Speaker

The MYND speaker by Teufel Audio is a portable speaker that “can be rebuilt from publicly available data”. The industrial designer and electrical engineer responsible for this project discuss their design ethos on the Teufel blog. - Teufel Blog