IoT Projects

Bright Block: A Bike Gizmo for Urban Science

Kelsey’s bike light does a bit more than we’d expect from a standard bike light. It’s also a climate monitor “built to capture and characterize several aspects of biking in the city”. As the cyclist rides, it measures and maps environmental data around the city, including temperature, humidity, and air quality. - HackADay

LED Matrix Sports Scoreboard

If you’ve ever wanted to see all of your sports stats in one spot, this project is for you. You can build a large RGB LED matrix display to monitor your favorite s teams. A Matrix Portal S3 running CircuitPython requests data from the ESPN API to show your teams’ gameplay data alongside team logos that are resized and gamma-corrected to look crisp and bright on the matrices. - Adafruit Learning System

A Cheap but Precise Weather Station

JP Gleyzes built a long-range weather station for their RC flying club. “These (wind) conditions are locally changing quite fast and the weather forecast is not accurate enough for our hobby”. The weather station’s feed can be accessed via this link. - HackADay

Hot Tub Monitoring Machine

Stephen’s hot tub monitoring system uses commercial sensors to track their hot tub’s water quality measurements. The system uses an ESP32 to read the sensors and send out the data to Home Assistant. They’ve included a “calibration mode” that verifies their sensor reads against a hot tub with a known good buffer solution. - HackADay

IoT News and More!

Adafruit.io and WipperSnapper Updates

This past month, a lot has been going on with our Adafruit.io platform and WipperSnapper firmware – Support for UART components, device auto-configuration, and new sensors. - Adafruit Blog

Philips Hue will force users to upload their data to Hue Cloud

Philips Hue is a fantastic IoT product that the author of this newsletter has written software for. Soon, they will soon require you to sign into their application and share data with the Hue Cloud. Home Assistant’s article covers the privacy implications of this change, and as of October 2nd, they have already reverted some of these changes. - Home Assistant

Sony energy harvesting module generates power from electromagnetic wave noise

Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation (SSS) has developed an energy harvesting module that uses electromagnetic wave noise energy to power IoT devices. - CNX Software Blog

Your Car is a Privacy Nightmare

Jenny List writes about the transition of the personal vehicle from a machine to a software product. - CNX Software Blog

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.