Adafruit IoT Updates

Adafruit IO Update: Set icons on your gauge and text blocks!

Settable Icons and decimal controls are now available for your Adafruit IO Gauge and Text elements! - Visit your Adafruit IO Dashboard to try it out now

New IoT Hardware: TinyPICO ESP32 Development Board

The smallest, most feature-rich ESP32 dev board has arrived at Adafruit…

There are quite a few ESP32 boards on the market, but they all require you to compromise on one or more features. Some don’t have on-board battery management, while some do but they don’t have low deep sleep current. Others have great low-power modes, but are large and not breadboard-friendly, and none of them have extra RAM unless you go for a more expensive and larger WROVER-powered board. We just weren’t happy with the status quo - we wanted to have our cake and eat it too! So we designed the smallest un-compromising ESP32 development board in the world, and then went a step further and gave it 4 MB of extra RAM, an on-board RGB LED, and more juice with a 700 mA 3.3 V regulator.

Visit the product page to learn more…

Coming soon: BrainCraft HAT for Raspberry Pi 4

We’ve started to design a BrainCraft HAT for Raspberry Pi and other Linux computers. It has a 240×240 TFT display for inference output, slot for camera connector cable for imaging projects, a 5 way joystick and button for UI input, left and right microphones, stereo headphone, stereo speaker out, three RGB DotStar LEDs, two 3 pin STEMMA connectors on PWM pins so they can drive NeoPixels or servos, and Grove/STEMMA/Qwiic I2C port. This should let people build a wide range of audio/video AI projects while also allowing easy plug-in of sensors and robotics! The BrainCraft has a wide variety of connectivity methods:

Wireless flexibility: WiFi, cellular, Bluetooth LE Works with adafruit.io, of course!

Visit the product page to learn more…

IoT Projects

a Hello World for ESP-NOW

ESP-NOW is “yet another protocol developed by Espressif, which enables multiple devices to communicate with one another without using Wi-Fi”. If you want to try out ESP-NOW right now, Jake Wachlin built an ESP-NOW example with example code on GitHub (you’ll need two ESP32 devices). He also took an extra step and performed latency and reliability testing from his city apartment (a very busy 2.4GHz spectrum).

Smart Outlet with MKR WiFi1010 and Adafruit IO

Smart plug to control a lamp using Google’s voice assistant with an Arduino MKR WiFi 1010 and a 5V relay - Hackster.io

Upgrade the ESP32 Firmware on your AirLift

Adafruit ships a variety of products which use the ESP32 as a WiFi co-processor with a variant of the Arduino nina-fw core. If you want to keep the firmware on your ESP32 WiFi co-processor up-to-date, you’ll need to update the firmware on the ESP32. This guide will teach you how to to turn your board into a USB-to-Serial converter to flash new firmware to your ESP32 – no extra hardware required! - Adafruit Learning System

Live-stream anywhere with an ESP32-CAM

Set up a streaming web server with face recognition and detection in less than five minutes with Arduino IDE (we sell a similar ESP32 camera module here) - via Maker.Pro

Set up Home Assistant with a Raspberry Pi

Create your own secure, smart-home-hub with HASSio, MQTT, Node RED and More!

Home Assistant is an open source operating system for a localized Smart Home Hub. Basically it works like IFTTT or Samsung Smart Things, but without having to send your data out onto the internet. This means that you have total control over your data, limit the amount of internet traffic from your smart devices, and tighten up security.

Read the guide on the Adafruit Learning System…

Fried Desk Lamp Reborn: Rebuilding a device with connectivity

Sean Boyce ran 220 Volts AC through his “fancy Xiaomi Smart Lamp”’s 12VDC transformer. He went about repairing it, but didn’t trust “installing another (potentially data-harvesting) app on [his] phone just to control a lamp] and thus wrote a protocol for the NodeMCU fan controller. - via HackADay

Running TensorFlow Lite Object Recognition on the Raspberry Pi 4

Want to up your robotics game and give it the ability to detect objects? Maybe implement a security camera that can see and identify certain items? Now that the Raspberry Pi is fast enough to do machine learning, adding these features is fairly straightforward. Take this guide a step further and interface image recognition with your favorite cloud IoT service. - via Adafruit Learning System

IoT Anti-Addiction Lockbox

Lock away your vices in an IoT anti-addiction lockbox. Aside from the internet-controlled lock, this box can detect the physical presence of an item using an ultrasonic sensor and a digital scale. - via Instructables

Monitoring 3D Printer Filament Humidity with low power radio

Dr. Scott M. Baker built small, wireless sensor nodes, to verify the storage of vacuum sealed “PrintDry” 3D Filament Storage containers. The sensor nodes transmit data using low-powered SYN115 radio modules, which are received by a Raspberry Pi connected to the internet. - via smbaker.com

Indoor Air Quality Monitor with PyPortal and Particle

Measuring the air quality in a your region can help you understand the world around you,

More than two billion people worldwide continue to depend on solid fuels, including fuels and coal, for their energy needs. Cooking and heating with fuels on open fires or traditional stoves result in high levels of indoor air pollution. Indoor smoke contains a range of health-damaging pollutants, such as small particles and carbon monoxide, and particulate pollution levels maybe 20 times higher than accepted guideline values.

This is a pretty through build - a Particle Argon acts as an environmental monitor, sends data to Particle Cloud, is logged to long-term Google Firebase storage, and displayed locally on a PyPortal. - via electromaker.io

eAgar: Large-scale plant monitoring with LoRa

eAgar is a system for monitoring conditions of agriculture fields. Each sensor device is plug-and-play (just initial device provisioning is required) thanks to using LoRa communication to an outdoor multi-channel LoRa gateway.

With more information from fields, farmers can predict appearance of disease and prevently treat their plants. That will help them to reduce costs, reduce damages on plants, increase quality of crops and increase yields. Using chemical agents on clever way, in smaller quantities, will enable to customers get healthier food.

Smart Gate - DIY’ing Secure Facility Access

Michael is building a smart security control gate to control who accesses the Institute Univeritaire De La Cote in Cameroon. - via Hackaday.io

Around the Internet - IoT News and Links

The “S” missing from IoT is for Security

Digi-Key and Adafruit have teamed up to present answers to the idiosyncrasies of properly connecting things to the internet or IoT – (AKA Internet of Things). When you see that the “S” is missing from IoT, that is because there is a large amount security missing from modern day internet connected devices. - Watch “All the Internet of Things: The S in IoT is for Security” on Youtube

Amazon Sidewalk: a new 900MHz Protocol

Amazon is taking a plunge into the Low-Power IoT (LPIOT) pool and announced they’re working on a protocol named Amazon Sidewalk. This protocol sits on the 900MHz frequency band and will link IoT devices together. Much like LoRaWAN, it supports secure OTA updates but also geolocation. There’s not a lot of information about this protocol, it won’t be out for a while (at least a year for the SDK) and the first device will be named Fetch is a locator which can clip onto your dog’s collar. - via Amazon DayOne This protocol does have it’s skeptics though - Kyle Wiggers wrote an article on VentureBeat detailing that he feels “Amazon Sidewalk’s success is Anything but Assured” - via VentureBeat

ATECC608 Cryptographic Co-Processor gets a CircuitPython Library

The ATECC608 is the latest crypto-auth chip from Microchip, and it uses I2C to send/receive commands. Once you ‘lock’ the chip with your details, you can use it for ECDH and AES-128 encrypt/decrypt/signing. There’s also hardware support for random number generation, and SHA-256/HMAC hash functions to greatly speed up a slower micro’s cryptography commands.

We’ve updated this guide to include instructions for wiring and using our new Adafruit CircuitPython ATECC library. This library can interface with your ATECC608 breakout and perform AES-128 signing, random number generation, SHA-256 hashing, Certificate Signing Request generation and more!

Follow along with the Adafruit Learning System Guide here…

NEW Book: Learning IoT with Python and Raspberry Pi

A new book on learning IoT using a Raspberry Pi with Python offers a full IoT curriculum for a person or a classroom. Some of the book’s contents include important internet-connected topics such as:

Control a servo using classes
Upload data to the cloud
Learn how to access a database using SQL statements
Deploy a home monitor system that uses the Raspberry Pi Camera and a PIR sensor circuit. Upload pictures to a web server in the cloud and access the pictures on a web page.
Control a robot using a multi-threaded application

Pre-order the book on Barnes and Noble’s website…

Comparing the ESP32 to the ESP32-S2

With more ESP32-S2 engineering samples in the wild, maker.pro published an analysis comparing the ESP32 to the new ESP32-S2. Xose Pérez notes that:

With the new ESP32-S2, Espressif is trying to fill a gap between the ESP8266 and the ESP32, both in features and price. The ESP32-S2 is not an ESP32 killer. Instead, it’s more an ESP8266 killer.

RPiAPI: a Lightweight WSGI API for RPi GPIO

Interact with your Raspberry Pi using RPiAPI - a Lightweight API built on top of RPI GPIO - via Hackaday.io

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Here at Adafruit, we sell all of these amazing components, but we couldn’t find a good way to interact with them over the Internet. So, we decided to create our own IoT platform, and that’s Adafruit IO. It’s built from the ground up to be easy to use and platform agnostic (connect any development board or device!). For those who want to get a project off the ground without programming - Adafruit IO offers a No-Code interface for building IoT electronics projects using WipperSnapper, our open-source IoT firmware. Support Adafruit’s open-source development by subscribing to Adafruit IO Plus, the upgraded, all-systems-go version of the Adafruit IO service.