IoT Projects

LEGO SMART Brick Reverse Engineering and Teardown

LEGO released a new product earlier this year, the SMART brick. The SMART brick uses a protocol called “BrickNet” to communicate with other bricks. The brick itself incorporates 25+ patents. The lego brick - something traditionally understood as a building block - is now a complex, black-box, piece of technology. The Maker audience is understandably interested in what’s inside the box, how it can be extended and incorporated in their projects. On YouTube, EvilmonkeyzDesignz shared a full teardown showing the inside of the SMART brick. Over on the Adafruit blog, we posted a draft about the potential process of reverse engineering the BrickNet protocol.

No-Code Snowfall Tracker

Winter weather can be unpredictable, especially when you’re trying to decide if it’s time to break out the shovel or if you can wait another hour. This project is a tiny, Internet-connected, desktop display that monitors real-time snowfall. - Adafruit Learning System

Local Voice Control on Raspberry Pi

The moonshine voice project is a fast, local, open-source AI project for live-audio capture and transcription. Tim C’s guide shows how to run Moonshine on a Raspberry Pi, and uses Moonshine’s API to capture and transcribe audio, and changes the NeoPixel color based on the transcribed text. We’re probably going to see a lot of these local-first approaches to voice control in the future as models mature and are optimized for edge deployment. - Adafruit Learning System

E-Ink Ship Tracker

This 7.3” E-Ink display is connected to an “Automatic Identification System” (AIS) receiver, which is a system used by ships to broadcast their location and other information. The E-Ink display in a nice frame passively shows the current location of nearby ships. This project could also be performed without the USD $85 AIS receiver, instead using an API to track ships. - Adafruit Learning System

Banamera Camera - Edit Photos with Voice

Banamera is a digital camera that can take a picture and make edits using Google’s Nano Banana’s photo editor API. They demonstrated it by taking a picture of LEGO minifigures and applying a real-time edit where a background of the moon is added. - HackaDay.io

IoT News and More!

Adafruit IO Dashboard Map Block

We shipped a major update to the Adafruit IO Dashboard maps block. In short, maps now support up to 5 feeds with per-feed customization (colors, icons, path lines), smart marker clustering for nearby points, auto-centering with fit bounds, a “follow feed” mode that tracks new data points, a legend, the ability to publish data directly by clicking the map, and cleaner popups. - Adafruit Blog

Reachy Mini Robot

I spent a while going back and forth on this one and it lands in the “IoT News and More” section, it is a commercially available kit. I also think it’s a pretty exciting platform for future robotics projects. Reachy Mini has 6 degrees of freedom, a camera, a microphone array and an open-source software stack (including a simulator). - Reachy Mini

Ikea tried to build a smart home for everyone — here’s why it’s not working yet

I covered Ikea’s recent inexpensive Matter smart home devices towards the end of last year. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy at The Verge writes how users are struggling to get these new devices (which promised low prices and reliability) connected to their home. - The Verge

This is why I keep buying ESP32 boards instead of more smart home gadgets

Samir Makwana details why he prefers to buy ESP32 boards and build his own smart home gadgets instead of buying pre-built devices (like the Ikea ones). - XDA Developers

Golioth Joins Canonical

Our friends at Golioth, a specialized IoT cloud platform, have been acquired by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. For the IoT and open source ecosystems, this appears to be a great addition and we’re excited to see how Golioth’s platform evolves under Canonical’s open-source umbrella. - Golioth 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.