IoT Projects

IoT Fog Machine with Motion Sensor

Step up your fall decor game this year with a motion-sensitive fog machine. This guide will show you how to hack a standard-issue Halloween-store fog machine to add lights and reactivity, and control your lights and fog from your smartphone – from anywhere in the world! - Adafruit Learning System

An Internet-Connected TI-84 with ChatGPT

Remember using TI-BASIC to create programs to calculate the side of a triangle, instead of memorizing the Pythagorean theorem? Well, it’s 2024 and this TI-84 has been modified to connect to the internet. It can connect to OpenAI’s ChatGPT client and can be used to chat with the AI. - HackADay

Use Apple HomeKit Devices with itsaSNAP and Adafruit IO

Have you ever looked at your various Apple HomeKit devices and thought “If only I could monitor and control my devices in Adafruit IO”? Now you can with the help of the itsaSNAP app. You can use Apple Shortcuts with itsaSNAP to integrate your Apple HomeKit devices with Adafruit IO. You can go even further and use CircuitPython to display and log your device’s data using Adafruit IO feeds.- Adafruit Learning System

An Interactive and Free Bluetooth GATT Course on YouTube

HackADay blogged about this excellent Bluetooth GATT (Generic Attribute) series on Cornell Professor V. Hunter Adams’ YouTube channel. You’ll learn about the protocol, set up a Bluetooth GATT server on a Raspberry Pi Pico W, and use a smartphone app to send data to the server. - HackADay

IoT News and More!

Cisco Is Abandoning the LoRaWAN Space With No Lifeboat For IoT Customers

Cisco announced it’s abandoning the Cisco LoRaWAN product lines in 2025 and the LoRaWAN space. Further, Cisco has announced that they are not providing migration plans. Companies who relied on Cisco’s reputation in the networking space to build their solutions are now left to find a new LoRaWAN network and hardware provider. - The Register

New Protocol: WiLo - WiFi Meets LoRa

WiLo is a new hybrid protocol that combines WiFi and LoRa. The result is a new approach for sending data (larger packet sizes than LoRa) over long distances, perfect for industrial IoT or agriculture IoT applications. - IEEE Spectrum

Aerogarden Shuts Down Its Servers

AeroGarden, which produces the “Smart Planters” sold by Scotts Miracle-Gro, is going out of business. The future of these desktop smart gardens is now uncertain, as they require a mobile app and a server to function. - ArsTechnica

IKEA Rolls Out Matter Support

Matter is the smart home industry’s new standard that allows smart products to connect and work together seamlessly, no matter which brand they’re from. IKEA is rolling out Matter support in their smart home hub, the DIRIGERA. The new firmware turns it into a “Matter Bridge” and is already available for download. - IKEA

Public WiFi in London Gets Hacked

Adafruit is located in New York City where there is now public WiFi in the subway stations. The same is true across the pond in London, except their public WiFi was recently hacked. The hacker was able to change the login message to a message about terror attacks. An internal investigation found that the hack came from “inside”, a breached admin account. This is a good reminder to consider what data you send when connected to a public WiFi network. - BBC

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.