IoT Projects

Off-Grid Message Board

Since this message board uses a LoRa mesh network, it does not need to rely on Wi-Fi, cellular, or any centralized infrastructure to receive and display messages. - Adafruit Learning System

Etsy Shop Sale Notifier

Stay off your phone and keep crafting away with this Etsy shop sale notifier. The shadowbox lights up to notify you of new sales. - Instructables

Converting a $20 4G wireless hotspot into a texting device

Repurposing a $20 4G wireless hotspot into a device that only sends and receives text messages. - Adafruit Blog

If it’s electronic paper, why not print to it?

Instead of manually loading files onto an Xteink X3 e-reader, NishantJoshi00 decided that they wanted to press Print on a MacBook and have their content appear directly on the e-reader. - Adafruit Blog

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Marquee - a new way to create interfaces for e-paper displays

I spent a couple of months working out how to avoid manually programming interfaces on an e-paper display that would take up valuable memory and processing power. The result is Adafruit Marquee, a way to visually create interfaces for e-paper displays and send them directly to the device without any additional coding. Assets like fonts, images, and layouts are not stored on the device itself. - Adafruit Playground

UDP Broadcasting and the Brave New World of IPv6

Maya Posh explores UDP broadcasting in IPv6, and compares it to the traditional IPv4 approach. - HackADay

Nordic nRF54LC10A

This chip came out the week I’m writing the IoT Monthly - so why not include it? Nordic’s nRF54LC10A is their new entry-level wireless SoC for ultra-low power wireless applications over BLE, Thread, Zigbee and Matter. -Nordic Semiconductor

IoT Projects

Pick the Perfect Plant: Battery-Powered Sun Tracking

Instead of guessing if the nursery plant you bought that requires “partial shade” is getting enough light, this project builds a battery-powered, weatherproof light monitor to discover the perfect plants for your garden. This project also includes an extra step for using the hundreds of data points it collected to create recommendations for the best plants to grow in your backyard or patio. - Adafruit Learning System

Replacing a $120k Bowling Center System with $1,600 in ESP32s

After buying an abandoned 8-lane bowling alley in the rural Midwest, section33 decided to replace the old scoring system. Unfortunately, the system cost more than the entire building. This post details their prototype to replace the old system with a new one built using modern electronics hardware. - Hacker News

XBee Garden Shed Sensor Network

A complete build log covering the design, decisions, and lessons learned from building a solar-powered wireless (XBee) sensor network for a garden shed. - smayze

How I Taught a Raspberry Pi to Read My Gas Meter with a Neural Network

Cian Gallagher’s attempt at training a Neural Network on a Raspberry Pi to read a gas meter in a difficult-to-reach location. - Cian Gallagher

E-Paper Lake Level Monitor

This E-Paper display monitors water levels on Georgia’s Lake Lanier. Every 15 minutes, the display updates from the Army Corps of Engineers, who are responsible for the lake and the dam. The Army Corps of Engineers makes sensor data available through their API. - Reddit

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IBM Home Director and Home Automation in 1996

IBM Home Director was an automation kit for your home in 1996. Using the X10 protocol to connect all the devices, Home Director aimed to bring home automation to the masses. Ionic1k walks through the usage of this retro software. - YouTube

Tracking Data Centers Across America

Data centers are the largest projects being built across America. PoweredByWho attempts to map the 2,300+ data centers and correlate their locations with easy-to-read public records (ownership, land usage, etc.). - poweredbywho

IoT Projects

Banned Book Library on a WiFi Smart Bulb

Rick Osgood modified a WiFi smart light bulb to host a banned book library. This is a highly creative reuse of existing IoT technology and the write-up is great. - richardosgood

Making an Autonomous Boat to Cross the Atlantic

Adafruit Forums user Autonomous_Sailboat built an autonomous motorboat to test a navigation system for an even more ambitious autonomous sailboat. - Adafruit Blog

Weathergotchi is an E-Paper Climate Logger

A cute, tiny, open-source climate logger that clips onto your backpack. The YouTube build is a fun watch, too. - Adafruit Blog

LLM Agent Embodiment Kit

Inspired by Olivia Zhu’s paper - “A Minimal Self-Perceiving Embodiment for Large Language Models”, this project gives an LLM agent access to a physical device with environmental sensors. Coupled with an agent skill, the physical embodiment kit runs in a closed-loop to sense and express its environment. - Adafruit Learning System

Tiny BLE Scanner

If you want to know what Bluetooth Low Energy devices are broadcasting, this tiny scanner picks up packets from nearby devices and displays them. - Adafruit Learning System

Plane Spotter — a Tactical ADS-B Desk Radar

This project from Italian maker Danilo Cannas shows the aircraft flying above your home in real-time. - Instructables

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Home Assistant Gets a Matter Upgrade

After four months of development, the newest version of Matter for Home Assistant has been released. The Matter server has been completely rewritten using the Matter.js library. This feature seems to benefit both Home Assistant, and Matter.js, making it a win for the Open Home Foundation. - home-assistant blog

IoT Projects

Seedling Frost Alert Device

I have not written a guide in a while, so I decided to publish a quick and easy project. Instead of losing your seedlings to an overnight frost, protect them by building a frost alert device! A little sensor node glows blue when it is predicted to freeze overnight. Additionally, you can opt-in to receive SMS/email notifications. - Adafruit Learning System

Solar LED Light as a Mesh Node

A creative hack for transforming a solar yard light from Lowe’s into a Meshtastic wireless node. - hackaday.io

Bambu Printer Status Display

A real-time, physical, dashboard for monitoring a Bambu Labs 3D printer. - GitHub

Logging Ham Radio repeater usage with a Baofeng

Tracking usage of the Austin N5OAK Ham Radio Club’s repeater by logging transmissions to the Cloud using a Baofeng radio. - whiskeytangohotel

Using ESP-Claw with a Local LLM

ESP-Claw is a new tiny AI device for Espressif microcontroller-based boards. After quickly hitting the rate-limit with a cloud LLM service, Anne looked at using it with a Local LLM model instead. - whiskeytangohotel

IoT News and More!

Qualcomm QCC74x

With WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, Thread/Zigbee, and a 352MHz RISC-V CPU, Qualcomm’s QCC74x MCU looks like it’ll directly compete with the ESP32 series in terms of performance and features. - HackADay

Anyone on The Internet Can Ring your (Temu) Doorbell

Temuri Takalandze looks at a $12 smart doorbell bought on Temu. By the end of their research, they could “silently steal any of these doorbells off its owner’s account”. - CircuitDojo Blog

You’ve seen the Chip Shortage and the Memory Shortage, now prepare for the PCB Shortage

The conflict in the Middle East has disrupted supplies of crucial raw materials and ‌pushed up prices of the printed circuit boards used in almost all electronic devices. - Adafruit Blog

IoT Projects

Focus Saver

Distracted by the background noise of their phone, this project helped AahanSharma stay focused by minimizing distractions. This device silences their phone and only alerts them when an important email arrives. While the Brick is a commercially available equivalent of this project, it lacks a display (which I find useful). - Adafruit Blog

ESP-Claw

There’s been plenty of OpenClaw projects for the ESP32, but this one is officially from Espressif Systems. The only thing to note is the extremely strict requirement (I learned of when I tried to get around it) for 8MB flash and 8MB PSRAM, which may limit its use for lots of ESP32-x variants. - ESP-Claw

A Website, hosted on an ESP32

The HelloEsp website is hosted on an ESP32 chip with 520KB of RAM instead of a traditional web server. Every aspect of the website is serviced by the ESP32 microcontroller. - HELLOESP

ESPectre - Detecting Human Movement

The Espectre project uses WiFi spectral analysis (CSI) to detect human movement. Unlike PIR sensors or cameras, Espectre can detect humans through walls and in the dark. This project ported Espectre to Arduino, to use it as a standalone component without needing a Home Assistant system. - Adafruit Learning System

Using a Raspberry Pi as a Router

Did the recent FCC rulings worry you about buying networking hardware? Follow this guide to use a Raspberry Pi as a router. - Adafruit Learning System

ESP-NOW Walkie Talkies

Using the ESP-NOW wireless communication protocol to send and receive audio data, this project created a pair of walkie talkies. - Adafruit Learning System

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The New License-Free IoT Spectrum: In-Depth Investigation into NR+

NR+ is a new license-free wireless standard that unlocks dedicated global spectrum for IoT. Psychogenic Technologies has the most in-depth investigation into this standard on the Internet. This is the type of technical content I love writing about - a 1.3 hour video that covers every aspect of this new standard, from the specification to building applications with it. - Psychogenic Technologies

Lion: A Self-Hostable IoT Server for Zephyr Devices

Lion is a self-hosted IoT backend. It’s open source, supports CoAP + DTLS, and provides a sensible way to do OTA firmware updates. This blog entry is the “engineering story” of why specific design decisions were made. - CircuitDojo Blog