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.

IoT Projects

Solar-powered MailboxBot

An internet-connected camera takes daily pictures of the inside of fhuable’s mailbox and uploads them to an FTP server. - fhu-space

WeatherBot - 3D Printable Weather Forecasting Theater

An internet-connected weather machine that displays the current forecast using a miniature diorama - hackaday

ML Weather Station Predicts Future Air Quality

A DIY weather station that uses machine learning to predict future air quality readings. - hackaday

Home Applications Prototype

Bakken & Bæck developed a “technical prototype for a collection of apps which would allow you to teach your old furniture some new tricks, which you could then control to suit your own personal needs at your leisure.” - everydayexperiments

Off-Grid Raspberry Pi Pocket Cloud Server

A Raspberry Pi Zero W is turned into a portable off-grid NAS storage solution. - instructables

Wireless MIDI with nRF24L01

A hack to send MIDI data over nRF24L01 radio modules. This may be useful for artists who are limited by physical MIDI cables in their performances. - hackaday

Off-grid LoRa Communicator

“I started this project because I often travel in convoy with friends to remote areas where sending a simple WhatsApp message is impossible due to non-existent cell phone signal.” - hackaday

TshWatch, ESP32 Watch

An ESP32 e-ink watch with a real-time clock, skin temperature monitoring, pedometer, air humidity, and pressure sensors. - hackster

IoT News and More!

WiFiWire – a I2C to UDP Bridge

WiFiWire provides a Wire (i2c) protocol able to communicate over AsyncUDP. You can have your program use a Wire (i2c) sensor/device, but it is communicating over a network rather than wiring. - Adafruit Blog

Cloning the AirTag

An experiment to develop an AirTag-clone. - positive.security

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.

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.