A note from the editor - We’ll make it together

Phil and Ladyada here, we usually do the newsletter each week, this week are diverting all our attention to efforts in NYC and awhile the world to help combat the COVID-19 outbreak. Thank you community for keeping us strong, and thank you Adafruit team for running the newsletter for now.

Adafruit was deemed an essential manufacturing, service and business in NYC by – Executive Order 202.6. We have a blog post with an overview and things are changing quick, stay tuned for updates on everywhere Adafruit is on social media - Read more.

We are Shipping a limited number of orders for health care professionals / urgent needs only. All other orders are being held for now.

Adafruit is a 100% woman-owned, loan-free, VC-free. profitable, USA Manufacturing company. Please see our about page and press page to read about us. Our founder and lead engineer is Limor Fried, a MIT Electrical Engineer.

We have paused some operations in NYC due to COVID-19, we are paying all team members, contractors, and more.

There are no layoffs for 130+ Adafruit team members. Adafruit was deemed an essential service to distribute/make some PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) such as face shields, and manufacturer electronics for essential life-saving/preserving equipment and development which is needed in New York and beyond.

Adafruit Industries located at 150 Varick Street, New York, NY 10013 by Executive Order 202.6, “Essential Business” by New York State: https://esd.ny.gov/guidance-executive-order-2026

Adafruit provides the following services:

Medical equipment/instruments including: Warehouse/distribution and fulfillment

Essential manufacturing including: Microelectronics/semi-conductor

Essential health care operations including: Medical supplies and equipment manufacturers and providers

We are maintaining some, but not all, business operations to assist in providing these valuable services to combat the COVID-19 outbreak.

If you are working on COVID-19 related efforts, we are shipping.

IoT Projects

AvoRipe – Check your Avocado’s Ripeness

Eden Bar-Tov built a device to check an avocado’s ripeness twice a day. If an avocado is ripe (AvoRipe checks both color and softness), a push notification will be sent to your phone notifying you that the avocado is ready to eat. - Adafruit

Stay Informed: How to Pull your Own COVID-19 Data

Tom Nardi wrote a guide on hackaday for pulling and scraping raw data about COVID19 from multiple data sources. If you’re building a way to monitor the total number of cases in your state or country, this guide provides reputable data sources along with Python code snippets. -HackaDay

Upcycled Cassette IoT Display

Martin Mander, aka Old Tech. New Spec, gives life to obsolete technologies, usually by sticking a computer in them and connecting them to the internet. In this example of the upcycler’s craft, he’s turned a cassette (an ancient, rubbish way of recording music) into an IoT notification reader. - Adafruit

Space Station Grow Box Replica

m1st3r_c is building a replica of the plant grow-box used on the Internal Space Station for the Natural History Museum of London. - Adafruit

Pushup Counter

Stay fit even if you have to stay inside! Use a proximity sensor to count your push-ups. - Hackster

Ethernet for CircuitPython with Wiznet5K

Wireless is wonderful, but sometimes you want the strong reliability of a wired connection. If your CircuitPython project is going to be part of a permanent installation, you’ll want to add ethernet networking to your project. - Adafruit Learning System

IoT News and More!

Are All Edge Devices “Servers”?

A discussion broke out on Twitter between leading experts in the field of servers, IoT, gateways and single-board computers over the future of “edge computing.” This post is meant to summarize what was talked about for a broader audience because it is relevant to how we, as an industry, think and talk about “The Edge.” - Adafruit

Eye on NPI - ESP32-S2

First off, we are kicking off “EYE on NPI” video series with the Espressif ESP32-S2 SoC. These chips come with a great core, lots of RAM, proven TLS+TCPIP stack, a complete development platform, and lots of code examples. If you’ve used the ESP8266 or ESP32 many elements will be familiar to you! The best new peripheral for this chip is the new USB OTG system. Yes finally native USB comes to ESP! - Adafruit

NEW VIDEO: What is Adafruit IO?

Build IOT projects with Adafruit IO! Control your projects over the internet and create a dashboard to visually see your sensor data - YouTube

Watchy, an ESP32-powered Open Source e-Ink Smartwatch

Squarofumi designed a beautiful open source smartwatch with Arduino and Python Support. This watch has a “200×200 E-ink display, WiFi + BLE (Powered by ESP32), BMA423 Accelerometer, 4 Buttons + Vibration Motor, DS3231 RTC for accurate time keeping, and a 2 Week Battery Life”. Schematics and code are available on GitHub. You can also purchase one for $55. - SquaroFumi

IoT Design Week - Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Ladyada and PT talked about Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence with Microchip Technology. - YouTube

Espressif ESP32-S2 Sample Boards Shipping

We’re seeing some ESP32-S2 samples appearing in the hands of more developers. We’re looking forward to TinyUSB, and then CircuitPython on this module. - TinyUSB

How Nordic Semiconductor Built ThingyWorld for Embedded World 2020

Nordic Semiconductor built an impressive asset tracking demo for their booth at the Embedded World 2020 conference. Their Thingy:9’s are distributed all over the world and tracked using AWS IoT core. - Nordic DevZone

Adafruit IO Stats and more!

Adafruit IO has 318,457 total users as of March 27, 2020! Here are the interesting stats from the last 30 days:

• USERS ACTIVE (30 days): 16,697
• TOTAL FEEDS: 482,240
• FEEDS CREATED (last 30 days): 21,104
• There are about 4,330+ MQTT connections active 24/7.

Sign up for Adafruit IO (for free!) by clicking this link. Ready to upgrade? Click here to read more about Adafruit IO+, our subscription-based service. We don’t have investors and we’re not going to sell your data. When you sign up for Adafruit IO+, you’re supporting the same Adafruit Industries whose hardware and software you already know and love! You help make sure we’re not going anywhere by letting us know we’re on the right track.

Support Adafruit

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.