IoT Projects

Pick the Perfect Plant: Battery-Powered Sun Tracking

Instead of guessing if the nursery plant you bought that requires “partial shade” is getting enough light, this project builds a battery-powered, weatherproof light monitor to discover the perfect plants for your garden. This project also includes an extra step for using the hundreds of data points it collected to create recommendations for the best plants to grow in your backyard or patio. - Adafruit Learning System

Replacing a $120k Bowling Center System with $1,600 in ESP32s

After buying an abandoned 8-lane bowling alley in the rural Midwest, section33 decided to replace the old scoring system. Unfortunately, the system cost more than the entire building. This post details their prototype to replace the old system with a new one built using modern electronics hardware. - Hacker News

XBee Garden Shed Sensor Network

A complete build log covering the design, decisions, and lessons learned from building a solar-powered wireless (XBee) sensor network for a garden shed. - smayze

How I Taught a Raspberry Pi to Read My Gas Meter with a Neural Network

Cian Gallagher’s attempt at training a Neural Network on a Raspberry Pi to read a gas meter in a difficult-to-reach location. - Cian Gallagher

E-Paper Lake Level Monitor

This E-Paper display monitors water levels on Georgia’s Lake Lanier. Every 15 minutes, the display updates from the Army Corps of Engineers, who are responsible for the lake and the dam. The Army Corps of Engineers makes sensor data available through their API. - Reddit

IoT News and More!

IBM Home Director and Home Automation in 1996

IBM Home Director was an automation kit for your home in 1996. Using the X10 protocol to connect all the devices, Home Director aimed to bring home automation to the masses. Ionic1k walks through the usage of this retro software. - YouTube

Tracking Data Centers Across America

Data centers are the largest projects being built across America. PoweredByWho attempts to map the 2,300+ data centers and correlate their locations with easy-to-read public records (ownership, land usage, etc.). - poweredbywho

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.