IoT Projects

PowerJeep: Upgrade your kid’s electric ride-on car

We love this project that can save a powerwheels electric ride-on car from the landfill and provide new functionality. The conversion replaces the old lead battery with an 18V Ryobi battery. It also replaces the electronics with an ESP32 programmed to remotely monitor and control the car’s speed. This project also contains a pretty small component list, with 6-7 total products to purchase. - HackADay

Receive push notifications from your rice cooker

Edent’s project for monitoring their reasonably priced rice cooker is simple - get an energy-monitoring smart plug and use it to send notifications to your phone when the rice cooker is done. - HackADay

DeskOps: Commanding My Desk with HTTP

Kevin Norman automated their standing desk to configure a schedule for when he’s standing up and working vs when he’s sitting down and working. The updated electronics system moves the desk up and down based on HTTP requests. - Kevin Norman’s Blog

PicoDVI Adafruit IO Feed Dashboard

This is a great way to display sensor data on any HDMI TV, especially for workshops or educational office spaces! You can display sensor data on any DVI or HDMI display with the Raspberry Pi Pico W and Adafruit’s Pi CowBell DVI Output. - Adafruit Learning System

IoT Battery Monitor

Recharge batteries and get an email when it’s done charging. The project uses a Feather ESP32-S2 Reverse TFT to monitor and display the battery voltage. It sends voltage data to Adafruit IO, allowing one to receive an SMS text or email when the battery is fully charged. - Adafruit Learning System

Elgato WiFi Light Controller

The Elgato series of lights has become really popular and use an app on your desktop or phone to control them. If you want manual control over your light’s brightness and color temperature, this project details how to build a physical device that can communicate with the lights over WiFi. - Adafruit Learning System

IoT News and More!

Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack

Espressif Systems has announced its acquisition of a majority stake in M5Stack. M5Stack is known for its modular, stackable, hardware platform. The author of this newsletter hopes there’ll be collaboration between the two companies resulting in interesting and novel development kits for the latest Espressif chips. - Espressif News Blog

Announcing The Open Home Foundation

The Open Home Foundation is a collection of over 240 projects, standards, drivers, and libraries. Notably Home Assistant, ESPHome, Zigpy, Piper, Improv Wi-Fi, and Wyoming are part of this foundation. The goal is to work against “surveillance capitalism, the risk of a buyout, and open-source projects becoming abandonware”. - Open Home Foundation

Siemens and Microsoft standardize digital-twin languages

Siemens and Microsoft are collaborating to standardize the language used to describe physical objects, called Digital Twins. They’re working together on a specification that “will be compatible with the W3C’s emerging Thing Description standard”. - RCRWireless

NYC Environmental Justice Mapping Tool Shows Users Environmental Hazards and More

Spending any amount of time with this mapping tool from the Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice is a bit overwhelming considering the sheer amount of data and what the data shows. - Adafruit 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.