Editor’s Note - Happy Holidays!

Reader,

Hello! I’m Brent. I am an engineer who works for Adafruit Industries on all kinds of things, including the newsletter you’re reading now.

This newsletter is distributed only once per month, giving me enough time to gather information from around the internet for you. This isn’t an industry newsletter, nor a newsletter covering every single project or news item. Instead, it’s a collection of projects and news that I find genuinely interesting. If you have feedback for improving this newsletter, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to make it better. Please email us at iotnews @ adafruit.com (remove the spaces!).

As a tradition, I typically write a newsletter that recaps my favorite things from the previous year. This issue lets me reflect on the past year and share with you some of the interesting projects and news that I’ve come across.

I’d also like to extend a “hug report” (Adafruit parlance for “thank you”) to our copyeditor, Anne, for her behind-the-scenes editing work on these newsletters for the past 5 years.

I hope the rest of your holiday season is wonderful, and I look forward to sharing more IoT news with you in the coming year,

Brent

p.s. Quick plug: We wrote a shopping guide! This newsletter is brought to you for free (no spam and we are 100% supported by you, the customer). We’ve asked our team of engineers/designers/developers who work on our free IoT Platform, Adafruit IO, to round up their favorite products on the Adafruit Shop for the holiday season.

2025 IoT Projects, in Recap

Holiday IoT Switch

This project was in the February 2025 newsletter. It did not make it into the IOT Monthly in time for the holidays but, fear not, I’m bringing it back for this issue. This switch uses a massive 10mm diameter arcade button to wirelessly send a message to a smart outlet to turn on the holiday lighting. - Adafruit Learning System

Engineering for Slow Internet in Antarctica

While working in Antarctica, brr “had access to the Internet only through an extremely limited series of satellite links provided by the United States Antarctic Program”. Modern websites often load up to 20 MB of Javascript, which makes connecting to the Internet in Antarctica a challenge. Brr’s exploration into engineering a faster, slow, internet is detailed in their blog post. - brr

Rain Sensing Umbrella Stand

A simple, compact umbrella stand that reads the weather forecast and lights up to notify you if rain is expected that day. - Adafruit Learning System

An $8 smart outlet to avoid brainrot

Neil Chen used an $8 smart outlet to avoid “brain rot”. When plugged in, a script blocks websites like X, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit, allowing him to focus and not get distracted by the Internet. - Neil Chen

ChatGPT for Rotary Phones

Pollux Labs transformed a rotary phone into a novel way to interface with ChatGPT. Dialing “1” will activate OpenAI’s Whisper API. The phone interacts with you through its handset. - hackster.io

2025 IoT News, in Recap

Arduino and Edge Impulse Join Qualcomm Technologies

Qualcomm Technologies acquired embedded ML platform Edge Impulse and open-source hardware company Arduino in 2025.

A Block-based Action Engine comes to Adafruit.IO

In Adafruit IO, Actions are a way to do something when a certain situation occurs. We’ve integrated Blockly within Adafruit IO to allow easy creation and editing of Actions on Adafruit IO. 2025 brought this new feature to life, along with lots of new projects to demonstrate its capabilities.

The Humane AI Pin Saga

The main story in February 2025 was the demise of Humane’s AI pin. This has been a poor rollout for one of the first consumer-focused AIoT hardware. After a large number of bad reviews spelled danger for the AI Pin - reports of units being returned more than they are sold and battery fire concerns made headlines. This all culminated in HP acquiring Humane in February for $116 million. As part of the acquisition, AI Pins stopped functioning on February 28, 2025. If you own one of these $699 devices, there is still hope! A recent WIRED article details a group working to keep the devices online.

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.