We just wanted to write a quick update that “Triggers” in Adafruit IO are now named “Actions”.

Existing API endpoints should continue to work, or you can use the new ‘/api/v2/actions’ endpoint.

Any client libraries or code using triggers should not require any changes.

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.

New Dashboard Blocks - Divider and Battery

We have two new block additions ready for you to use in your IO dashboards.

The first is the Divider Block. This block is a simple way to help you organize your dashboard and break it up a bit. You can stretch the block horizontally or vertically. Basically, just edit the block layout and drag and drop to where you would like the line divided. It allows for a couple of line widths as well.

The second new block is the Battery Block. This block takes a value from 0-100.0 and displays the percentage left in a battery icon. It also allows for the text of the value to be displayed, similar to the options on a phone. This block works particularly well paired with the Adafruit LC709203F Fuel Gauge and Battery Monitor.

Resizable Toggle Switch Block

A change you’ll be seeing soon (or it’s already been made by the time you read this) is that the Toggle Switch Block will be updated to dynamically resize.

It will fit a percentage of the block’s entire size. This may cause some of your existing toggle switches to either jump in size or shrink down a bit. We think the added flexibility is worth the trade-off in having to adjust the existing blocks, and we hope you do as well.

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

Monitoring the 21st Century Henhouse

James Bowman posts about successfully automating reading the status of a chicken coop. It uses a Raspberry Pi Pico doing perform sensing, with a 915 MHz Lora module to transmit the status back to the base. It’s powered by the coop’s 12V battery via a 5V linear regulator. - Adafruit Blog

Internet of Things Mood Tracker for School or Work

How are you doing? That’s sort of the idea behind this project that helps track the overall mood of a cohort of students. - Adafruit Blog

IoT Project Ideas for COVID-19 Prevention

Umwelt-Caompus Birkenfeld has been building up a large number of projects revolving around CO2 measuring devices for classrooms. Even after the pandemic, CO2 visualization leads to targeted ventilation in classrooms which reduces a student’s fatigue. - umwelt-campus, Note: This website is in German, you may need to use Google Translate

Hot Tub Water Quality Monitoring

Building a water quality monitoring system for a hot tub. The hot tub’s water quality can be measured on an online dashboard and send SMS texts for chlorine emergencies. - Hackster

Plush IoT Birthday Reminder Lamp

Charvi Shrimali created an internet-connected cupcake lamp “that receives data from my calendar and lights up, reminding me to not forget my friends in the madness of grad school”. This plush lamp is stitched using polyfill and fabric and uses a combination of the Adafruit Feather HUZZAH ESP8266, Adafruit IO, and IFTTT Google Calendar applet. - Adafruit Blog

IoT News and More!

Espressif Matter Series

Matter is a new initiative of the Connectivity Standards Alliance and developed through collaboration amongst all the leaders of the IoT industry. Espressif has developed a series of 6 blog posts that detail the protocol. - Espressif

Samsung Upcycling Program to Enable Consumers to Repurpose Galaxy Smartphones Into IoT Smart Home Devices

I previously posted about Samsung’s upcycling program when it was announced as I’m interested in the concept of giving our outdated devices a “new life”. Samsung’s new SmartThings Labs app allows a person to reuse their Galaxy smartphone as sound or light sensor nodes, for use in a smart home. - Samsung Newsroom

Sigfox, HT Micron, and Nowi Tease an Energy-Harvesting IoT Module

Sigfox, a firm known for low-power-wide-area (LPWA) technology, is working with Nowi and HT Micron on a new energy harvesting IoT device. The device will reportedly extract “extracts power from ambient energy sources like light and vibration to charge a variety of energy storage elements such as a rechargeable battery or a capacitor.” - enterpriseiotinsights

Amazon expands Sidewalk with a new bridge

Amazon’s Sidewalk low-power wide-area network protocol has been running on echo devices for the past year. The Amazon Ring and Amazon Tile devices operate on the same bandwidth and connect to this network. In an effort to expand their Sidewalk network, Amazon introduced the “Amazon Sidewalk Bridge Pro by Ring”. This is an enterprise-grade LPWAN bridge designed to build a network of devices that operate on their Sidewalk ecosystem. - TechCrunch

Casually Chirping Into the World of LoRaWAN

Hackaday’s Maya Posch writes about the long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) modulation technique which is becoming popular in IoT applications. - HackaDay

A Practical Approach To Attacking IoT Embedded Designs

An incredibly in-depth blog post from IOActive Labs about embedded IoT software hacking. - IOActive

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.

Editor’s Note

Hi readers! This is the last Internet of Things Monthly newsletter for the calendar year of 2021. I’ll be listing off what I enjoyed reading about in 2021, some trends, and the excellent projects which have come across my desk.

If you’re a new reader to this newsletter - welcome! I’m Brent. I’m an engineer at Adafruit who works on all kinds of things, including writing the IoT Monthly. This newsletter was previously known as the Adafruit.io newsletter and only contained news and projects about our Adafruit.io IoT Platform. In 2019, we expanded this newsletter to the broader topic of the Internet of Things. Unlike Adafruit’s other newsletters which are sent on a more frequent basis, this newsletter is distributed only once a month, giving enough time for me to gather information from around the internet for readers. I’d also like to extend thanks to Anne Barela for her behind-the-scenes editing work on these newsletters for the past two years.

This past year, I’ve helped launch the beta of Adafruit’s WipperSnapper platform. I’ll be working with the IO team on making it even better in 2022, more to come!

Thank (over 4,000+ of) you for subscribing to this newsletter. Next month’s issue will return to regular programming.

Cheers,

Brent R.

p.s.: If you have any feedback or want to submit your project to this newsletter, send an email to iotnews@adafruit.com.

Projects

We’ve posted a good number of IoT projects which combine Machine Learning with the capabilities of the internet….

• The camera that determines the type of bird at a feeder
• Making an analog power meter smart with a neural network
• Detecting if a package is sitting on your porch

Another recurring project type we saw was data visualization projects. The environment around us is often invisible and people enjoy building projects to help illustrate trends and understand environmental data.

• This freeform circuit sculpture displays the current weather forecast.
• The Weather station that predicts rainfall intensity.
• A network of over twenty(!) Bluetooth soil sensors in a garden “to provide a comprehensive picture of just what the water in the dirt is doing”.
• The Canari lamp is a beautiful way to transform local air quality readings into lighting patterns.
• A wall-mounted e-ink newspaper that fetches the news every morning.
• Lots of air quality sensor projects have been written about this year.
• Lastly, tracking a turtle’s activity during the day.

Stories and News

I’ve enjoyed reading and learning about…

• Increased deployment of satellite-based internet providers.
• Sensors that harvest energy and generate their own power.
• Matthias Bösl’s writings on developing commercial IoT projects.
• 2021 has brought a nice offering of IoT chipsets from EspressIf such as the ESP32-S2, the ESP32-C3, and the ESP32-H2.
• Device upcycling initiatives by large corporations like Samsung.
• Ultra-wideband radios caught my eye when Apple announced their new AirTag location tags, powered by Ultra-wideband. Jenny List provides a technical dive into these new radio signals and modules.
• Improv, an initiative funded by Nabu Casa which promises a “free and open standard with ready-made SDKs that offer a great user experience to configure Wi-Fi on devices”.
• An attempt to illustrate the contrasting internet speeds in Germany where reporters ran an experiment to see if data delivered via horse would arrive faster than over broadband.

IoT Projects

Automating a Morning Coffee Routine

Petertree built a coffee maker which is “2x more expensive and messy than the one you can get on Amazon”. - Hackster

Putting a WiFi Router into an iPhone Wall Charger

Ryan Walker is building a “purpose-built router to be used in network attacks and exploits” which fits inside the casing of a standard iPhone wall charger - MachineHum.Medium.com

How to Get an AWS IoT Project Quickly Off the Ground

Demonstrating a model-based AWS IoT development for IoT development using state machines. - EmbeddedArtistry

Integrating a Plant Watering Project into an Existing Home Automation System

Sasa details their experience integrating a watering system into a scratch-built home automation system. - HackADay

Extracting Data from a Smart Scale

Kevin Norman extracted his data from a WiFi scale’s mobile app using optical character recognition (OCR) - HackADay

Pogo Pin Lock and Key with MQTT

Cheats built “a kind of lock and key that acts sorta like a USB hardware token”. Once the key is placed into the “lock”, an MQTT message is sent from the ESP8266 to perform an “unlock” action on the internet. - Hackster

Connecting a Robot Cat to the Internet

Charlyn Gonda developed a LinkedIn Learning IoT course for beginners which teaches “how to use CircuitPython—a version of Python specifically for microcontrollers—to program a robot cat that reacts to events while connected to the internet.” - LinkedIn Learning

IoT News and More!

Best practices for debugging Zephyr-based IoT applications

Best practices for debugging IoT projects that run on the Zephyr real-time operating system. - Embedded

Building an IoT Product — The Product(ion) Feedback Loop

A blog post from the perspective of an engineer about producing a physical IoT product using different Electronic Manufacturing Services. - Medium

ESP32-H2 Officially Recognized as a “Thread-Certified Component” and a “Zigbee-Compliant Platform”

The upcoming ESP32-H2 module is ZigBee compliant and supports the upcoming Matter protocol. - Espressif

No battery? That’s no problem for the future Internet of Things

Josiah Hester is producing batteryless devices for the future of IoT. One of the devices is a Gameboy powered by button presses and the sun. - Adafruit Blog

Adafruit ESP32-S2 Feather

What’s Feather-shaped and has an ESP32-S2 WiFi module? What has a STEMMA QT connector for I2C devices? What has your favorite Espressif WiFi microcontroller and lots of Flash and RAM memory for your next IoT project? What will make your next IoT project flyyyyy? That’s right - it’s the new Adafruit ESP32-S2 Feather! We also made one with a built-in BME280 temperature/humidity/pressure sensor - Adafruit Store

NEW IOT HARDWARE: ESP32-S3 Box

The ESP32-S3-BOX provides a platform for developing the control of home appliances using Voice Assistance + touch screen controller, sensor, infrared controller, and intelligent Wi-Fi gateway. - Adafruit Store

NEW IOT HARDWARE: ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 Dev Boards

The ESP32-S3-DevKitC-1 is an entry-level development board equipped with ESP32-S3-WROOM-1, a general-purpose Wi-Fi + Bluetooth LE MCU module that integrates complete Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE functions. - Adafruit Store

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.