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.

New Features to IO Actions

We’ve deployed a few improvements to actions recently.

Email Templating

The first is the ability to modify the subject and body of the email related actions (reactive and scheduled). You can now customize the content of them by using a simplified templating system similar to how webhooks worked in the past. For example your subject can now include the name of the feed and value:

The {{feed_name}} has just gone above the high mark of {{value}} degrees.

Reactive Notification Limits

The second new feature is the ability to limit how often reactive actions will notify you if something happens. For example, you may only want to be notified once per day if your mailbox is opened. This was an oft-requested feature, and we’re hopeful it makes the actions a bit less spammy for those that prefer fewer notifications.

Another feature that we added, is the reactive action option to “Notify on Reset”. If selected, this feature will bypass any notification time limits and always alert you once your action is no longer in an ‘alarm’ state. A good example of when this woudl be useful is if you have a sump pump. You get a notifiaction when the water level is high, but then you also want to know that the water level has gone back down once the water is pumped out and is no longer in an alarm state.

IO Free and Reactive Emails

IO users on a free account can now setup reactive actions with email as an output format. This is limited to a single email every 15 minutes. Your adafruit account must be verified in order to enable email actions as well.

Various actions fixes

We’ve also deployed quite a few fixes around creation and editing of actions. Let us know if you’ve found anything new or still outstanding.

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