We’re back with new WipperSnapper features, exciting open source integrations, and a fresh design language for all of IO!

New! Built-in Firmware Installer for WipperSnapper

With the WipperSnapper firmware rocketing through the versions (Beta 39 last I checked!), we’ve made it easier than ever to install it on compatible hardware. Visit the new board selector to get started!

First, you’ll be presented with a list of compatible boards (18 and growing!) Select a board and IO dons its robe and hat to walk you through the install as a series of simple, well-explained steps (it’s a wizard, get it?)

Here’s the sort of thing we cover:

• plugging the board in with an appropriate cable
• downloading the latest, stable firmware version, built custom to your board
• a helpful reset timing animation for reliably entering bootloader mode
• setting up your secrets file (AIO Key embedded automatically!)
• understanding the pattern of blinking lights during firmware boot

Note: Not all WipperSnapper-compatible boards work with the new firmware installer. We still have our external firmware tool for LittleFS boards, and the original, manual install guide.

Open Source the Good Parts

Curious how all of this works? You’re in luck, as WipperSnapper is following a well-worn path for us here at Adafruit of open-sourcing the most powerful bits of our software systems: the data that drives things!

The list of compatible boards is driven by a few lines of JSON and some optional image files from the WipperSnapper Boards repository. Go on, take a peek if you’re curious! I’ll wait.

Cool huh? Now, if you’re interested in adding a whole new board to the WipperSnapper system, you’re in luck! Just for folks like you, we’ve written a guide to submitting new hardware to WipperSnapper.

So what are you waiting for?!? Now anyone can get their IoT products into the no-code-zone… with Adafruit IO and WipperSnapper!

User Interface Update: Main Menu

If you’ve looked in the past couple of weeks, you may have noticed the entire top of Adafruit IO has gotten a refresh. We’ve cleaned up the main menu, made links instant, and organized individual pages to share a common design language. Taken altogether, the site becomes easier to get around and just feels snappier.

Let’s look at some of the changes.

AIO Key and New Device Button

The “AIO Key” button is now a simple key icon. It still works the same, it’s just prettier! Its companion, the “New Device” button, gets you straight into the new, easy-to-use board installer no matter what page you’re on.

Devices

The “Devices” menu item is really just WipperSnapper, but renamed and moved to the front of the menu! As WipperSnapper settles down and accepts its destiny as the easiest way to use IO, it will gradually just become IO.

Take a look at the Devices page and you’ll see we’ve improved how your existing WipperSnapper devices are visualized:

Feeds, Dashboards, and Actions

These 3 pages kept their names (though “Actions” used to be “Triggers”.) The Feeds page now more clearly differentiates traditional Groups and Feeds from WipperSnapper Devices and Components.

Services became Power-Ups

“Power-Ups” is a simple rename from what were called “Services”. This is in anticipation of expanding these in the medium future, as we think they pair beautifully with the sheer ease of using WipperSnapper. Stay tuned!

Flyouts Gone

There are no more “flyouts” when you click a menu item, instead we navigate to the selected page instantly. We think this is a better experience: the whole site feels snappier!

Where’s my Profile?

We removed “Profile” as a main menu link, it was taking up valuable space and we already had other ways to get to those account pages. For instance, you can click your username just below the main menu on the left of most pages. You can also click “Account” near the top right of the page to reveal an “Adafruit IO Profile” link. (Sub-pages in the Profile area also need love and will be updated in a future release.)

Buttons! Alerts!

We’ve begun a broad overhaul to the design language of Adafruit IO, starting with the things you touch the most (Buttons!), and the things that yell at you the most (Alerts!).

This work will continue as we ship other features in the coming weeks.

Actions Page Update

The interface for creating and changing Actions was kind of buggy, so we updated it in this release as well. (Actions are another great pair for WipperSnapper!) The form is laid out better on its own page (instead of inside a “pop over” window.) We think it’s much nicer to use, now.

We think this makes a lot more sense, and it doesn’t break so easily now!

As always, if you have any suggestions or bugs to report about these new features, please let us know in the forums.

IoT Projects

eInk Postcard Frame

This digital picture frame with an e-Ink display allows friends to upload and share photos to the display via a web interface. The project’s creator notes, “a kind of slow, fancy and black and white Snapchat”. - Hackaday.io

VR Spectrum Analyzer

A virtual reality interface for the spectrum analyzer software package, RTL-SDR. Considering most of our reader’s workbenches are full of diagnostic tools with small displays like oscilloscopes or multimeters, there’s a lot of potential in VR/AR tooling for engineering work. There’s a video on YouTube showing the tool in action. - GitHub.com

LoRa QWERTY Communicator

A “feature-packed” communication device for communicating text messages over the LoRa protocol. This project provides an alternative to cellular-based text message communication with low setup overhead. The editor especially likes the repurposing of a Blackberry Q10 keyboard. - GitHub

Plant Bot - Automated Plant Care

A “smart” gardening stake project that monitors and measures a plant’s moisture. Plants can be watered by pumps connected to the plant bot stake, too. - Hackaday.io

Building A Smarter Sprinkler System

Chris moved into a home and the “existing sprinkler system controller turns on when it is not supposed to, and forgets everything whenever the power blips”. The completed project integrates into Chris’ existing home sprinkler system controller and he now manages the 24V system using Python. - cdake

IoT News and More!

S1 System On Module

Silicon Witchery announced their S1 “System on a Module” for Bluetooth, FPGA, and Battery Management. This “hybrid” module mixes 4 components which are traditionally separate on a development board, into one chip. The S1 contains a nRF52 for processing and Bluetooth 5.2 support, a flash module for boot-code and user storage, a iCE40 FPGA for additional GPIO/SPI/I2C peripherals, and a PMIC buck-boost for charging. - Silicon Witchery

ESP32uesday: ESP32 Family, GPIO and Adafruit_Protomatter

Adafruit’s Phil B writes about the journey to acquire a more profound knowledge of the Espressif ESP32 family. - Adafruit Blog

Adafruit.io, the IoT Platform for Everyone

Sign up for our IoT Platform, Adafruit IO (for free!) by clicking this link. We don’t have investors and we’re not going to sell your data. When you sign up for Adafruit IO+, you’re supporting the same Adafruit Industries whose hardware and software you already know and love! You help make sure we’re not going anywhere by letting us know we’re on the right track.

IoT Projects

Smart Girder - a Structural Information Display

Lame_Dave’s Smart Girder project adds an enormous RGB LED matrix into a structural girder in their home. Using a combination of scripts including Home Assistant, the Smart Girder can display data such as train times, weather information, overhead flights, and their car’s battery level - Hackster.io

Using SDR to Monitor Tire Pressure on a 2008 Toyota Tacoma

With his 2008 Toyota Tacoma only giving him information that the tire pressure is low, Ross reverse-engineered the tire pressure monitoring sensors. He used a Software Defined Radio (SDR) dongle to listen in on the frequency broadcasted by the tire monitoring sensors. If you’re into reverse engineering radio packets, this is the write-up for you! - r-c-y

Pothole detector using Kria KV260

The Kria KV260 camera module is used in conjunction with machine learning models to identify and take pictures of potholes in India. If a pothole is identified, an image and the location of the pothole are transferred to the local repair authority. - Adafruit Blog

GSM & SMS Enabled AI-driven (TinyML) Water Pollution Monitor

A budget-friendly device for collecting water resources in the field and forecasting pollution levels using TinyML. - Adafruit Blog

LoRa Mesh Network of Birdhouses

Placing LoRa radios in birdhouses to build a low-cost emergency mesh network for communicating across town. - WARS-Birdhouse

Building Alerts for Household Water Leaks

Suhas Deshpande built a water leak detection (and alert) system using a Raspberry Pi and a water leak sensor. Their software setup consisted of using Courier to create custom alert thresholds and Twilio for SMS/Email notifications if a leak is detected. - Courier Blog

Build an IoT Thermometer with Adafruit IO WipperSnapper

Digi-Key built an IoT thermometer using Adafruit’s no-code IoT platform, WipperSnapper. The ESP8266-based development board communicates with a BME280 module via I2C, requests temperature and humidity data every 30 seconds, and uploads the measured values to Adafruit IO. - Digi-Key

IoT News and More!

Home Automation Company Insteon Abruptly Closes

The smart-home company, Insteon, vanished during the month of April. Ars Technica reports:

“The service has been down for three days now despite the company status page saying, “All Services Online.” The company forums are down, and no one is replying to users on social media.

Insteon devices are reported to work locally, however, the voice assistant features no longer work. Further - the application used to configure (or re-configure) the Insteon Hub or Insteon Automations no longer works.

Thankfully, Home Assistant - an Open Source Home Automation project, supports Insteon devices. A blog post details how to integrate Home Assistant with existing Insteon devices and previews a new hub within Home Assistant for Insteon devices.

Better IoT Design Patterns: Desired State vs. Actual State

Golioth’s Mike Szczys is writing a series entitled “Better IoT Design Patterns”. In this blog post, he addresses the problem of a remote device’s state not syncing with the state of a virtual device. - Golioth

Adafruit.io, the IoT Platform for Everyone

Sign up for our IoT Platform, Adafruit IO (for free!) by clicking this link. We don’t have investors and we’re not going to sell your data. When you sign up for Adafruit IO+, you’re supporting the same Adafruit Industries whose hardware and software you already know and love! You help make sure we’re not going anywhere by letting us know we’re on the right track.

For the endpoint: https://io.adafruit.com/api/docs/#get-feed-data

We will be adjusting the default limit of 1000 records down to 100 records on April 29th, 2022.

This is simply the default, and if you need to process more you can pass the proper params to retrieve more data.

We’ve found that they way these endpoints are being used is that this is being called over and over by programs at a rapid rate, when I don’t think many users are expecting to retrieve the same 1000 records over and over again. This should help reduce some unexpected loads on our backend systems.

As always, if you have any suggestions or bugs to report about these blocks, please let us know in the forums. We have a specific forum for block suggestions that we periodically check as well.

IoT Projects

Happy Birds - a Connected Bird Feeder

An internet-connected bird feeder with an ultrasonic sensor that snaps pictures of birds when they land for dinner. Data is sent to a mobile application named Happy Birds. - Instructables

Is My Boat Safe - An Arduino-Based Boat Monitor

This project monitors a riverboat parked at a marina. This IoT system has it all - geofencing (locational GPS) to prevent boat theft, an accelerometer for if someone crashes into the boat, alarms to track if the bilge is filling, fuel status, battery voltage, and more. - Arduino Create

Remote Temperature Sensor with Indoor Display

An outside temperature sensor’s value is displayed both on the internet and inside a home on a small OLED display. - whatimade

HTML5 and CSS parser and render pipeline on an ESP32

Rendering and parsing HTML5 + CSS on an ESP32 with the goal of displaying dynamically generated web content on a screen connected to the ESP32. - libwebsockets

Indoor air quality measurement with Adafruit Feather and Adafruit IO

Worried about your indoor air quality? tdw writes:

I was feeling poorly late this Summer and during that time, my wife made a comment about the quality of the air in our home. Since I wasn’t sleeping well during that period, it got me thinking that perhaps I should do a quick project to measure it. I did some research into various sensors, bought a few and set up a breadboard circuit that measured CO2, PM2.5, temperature, humidity and TVOC. I connected the thing to the Adafruit.io IoT cloud and built a few dashboards to let me watch.

Solar Tracker based on ESP32 with low-cost actuators integrated on Home Assistant

Vini’s Lab was visiting their parents in Brazil when they noticed they used statically mounted solar panels. To improve the output of the solar panels, they used low-cost actuators to move the panels based on the time of the day. - HackADay

Raspberry Pi Smart Magic Mirror

A DIY smart mirror powered by the Raspberry Pi and the MagicMirror2 software to display weather, calendar appointments, and the NYC subway transit schedule. - Becky Stern

IoT News and More!

WipperSnapper Updates - No-Code IoT by Adafruit

The Adafruit IO team has been working on WipperSnapper, our no-code IoT platform which works with any WiFi-enabled device. If you haven’t tried it out yet - we added a few installation and usage guides for popular IoT hardware such as the Feather ESP32v2, Feather ESP32, and the Feather ESP8266. Additionally, we’ve added support for the MCP9601 thermocouple amplifier and a guide on how to add your own components to WipperSnapper.

NIST CyberSecurity for IoT Publications

NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, published some guidance documents and drafts which dive into IoT Device guidance for manufacturers and federal agencies looking to deploy IoT devices within their network.

Adafruit.io, the IoT Platform for Everyone

Sign up for our IoT Platform, Adafruit IO (for free!) by clicking this link. We don’t have investors and we’re not going to sell your data. When you sign up for Adafruit IO+, you’re supporting the same Adafruit Industries whose hardware and software you already know and love! You help make sure we’re not going anywhere by letting us know we’re on the right track.