IoT Projects

BLE-based Crowd Indicator for Small Stores

Smaller shops may not be able to hire extra employees to enforce or monitor social distancing. This solution by Ian Mercer tracks every Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) device nearby to figure out when the store is busy. - Hackster

PyPortal Home Office Busy Display

Diana Perkins (@diana_perkins) built a display using a PyPortal to show when someone in their home offices is busy. It’s controlled using a “rails app running on a machine on our local network so we can trigger it even if we already sat down for a meeting” - Twitter

Mesh WiFi Music-Reactive Light System

GlowFly is a WiFi connected, programmable and music reactive light system. When multiple nodes are combined, it is possible to span a mesh of WiFi connected devices which are synchronously reacting to music. - HackaDay

Electronic Security Lock using AWS Serverless

A small security lock you can text, powered by Amazon AWS Serverless. - Amazon

Vision Alert System with Azure IoT Edge and Jetson Nano

Build a vision system using a NVIDIA Jetson Nano with a webcam and the Azure Custom Vision service. This project sends an email alert to your inbox if an image has been identified. - henkboelman

Aquarium Automation with nRF52840

Aquarium automation system using a Feather nRF52840 and four extra FeatherWings. There’s an automatic fish-feeder and Raspbery Pi based fishpi monitors for temperature and lights. Scripts used in this project are open-source and on GitHub -Twitter

This Blog is Now Running on Solar Power

Lou Wrentius’ blog is now running on one solar panel and an old car battery. There’s a solar panel on his balcony “which is connected to a solar charge controller”. Clicking through to their blog, you can see a sidebar which shows the solar panel’s status. This widget runs on the same solar-powered Raspberry Pi which hosts the blog. If the weather is favorable, “the solar panel provides way more power than is required to keep the battery charged and run the Raspberry Pi”. -louwrentius

Dawn and Dusk Porch Lights

WiFi-enabled Wemo switch to turn off a porch-light at dawn and dusk. This switch includes an intelligent scheduler which obtains the location-specific sunset and sunrise times from the internet. - HackaDay

Wirelessly monitor G-Force from high-contact sports

Monitoring G-Force with a device attached to an ice-hockey helmet. Data is logged from the device to Adafruit IO. -Maker.io

Solar Powered Weather Station

Mark Komus built a solar-powered weather station that reports its recorded data to Adafruit IO, our easy-to-use IoT platform for everyone. A BME280 sensor monitors temperature, pressure and humidity. Sparkfun’s weather gauges are mounted at the top of the metal pole. - Adafruit

IoT News and More!

Use intent parsers to program your first voice AI

Programming a voice assistant for open-source home automation projects using the Mycroft voice assistant API. - OpenSource

New “Works with Google” program is Similar to Apple HomeKit

StaceyOnIoT points out that the new “Works with Google” program for smart-home devices is similar to Apple HomeKit, both services rope users into an vendor-specific ecosystem. - StaceyOnIoT

Alexa Connect Kit (ACK) Chipset Released

Amazon detailed a new Espressif-powered chipset which enables “WiFi, Bluetooth LE and all the software needed for Alexa control”. - Amazon

Adafruit IO

Adafruit IO Update: New Trigger Functionality

The Adafruit IO team has released some changes to Adafruit IO, our easy-to-use-internet of things platform. First is an update to Scheduled Triggers. Scheduled triggers now have a much more robust option to scheduling. If you’re familiar with cron scheduling, you’ll be familiar with this new system. You can schedule based on a number of new time and date options.

We’ve also added the ability for reactive triggers to email a value based on the feed that is being acted on, or now you can also update the value of any of your feeds from that trigger. For example, if the ‘humidity’ in your house is > 50%, you could update another, ‘dehumidifier’ feed to set the value to “ON”.

Finally, we’ve made further system changes that should improve the performance of Adafruit IO for all users.

Read more about all the changes here…

Adafruit IO Stats

Adafruit IO has 338,708 total users! Here are the interesting stats from the last 30 days:

• Total Feeds: 529,571 (and counting!).
• There are over 17,000 feeds online as of time of writing (July 30 2020).
• There are an average of 4,000+ 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.