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.

IoT Projects

Grafana Data Source for The Things Network

A method for streaming LoRaWAN sensor data from The Things Network to Grafana, an open-source data visualization tool. - Lupyuen on GitHub

Tracking a Turtle’s Day with WipperSnapper

Using an Adafruit Funhouse and a PIR motion sensor, this fun project tracks the movement of Cujo the turtle. Then it analyzes and visualizes the data gathered. - Adafruit Learning System

Determining When to Water your Plants with an Internet-Enabled Scale

Typically, IoT plant monitoring involves a resistive moisture sensor. Phidgeteer built a plant monitoring solution that monitors the water weight of the plant with an internet-connected scale. - Adafruit Blog

IoT Alarm Clock with Speech Synthesization

This alarm clock has a 3W speaker which can wake you up by playing audio from a text to speech synthesizer, an internet radio station, or local news. - Instructables

No-Code WipperSnapper Water Detection

Setting up a water sensor inside Adafruit’s factory to prevent water damage from the massive AC units. - Adafruit Learning System

Connecting a Miffy bunny to the Internet of Things with MicroPython, ESP8266, and MQTT

Jesse Andrews posts about hacking a Miffy bunny lamp from Japan with NeoPixels and a web server. - Adafruit Blog

IoT News and More!

Resurrecting the Nabaztag IoT Bunnies from 2005

The Nabaztag bunny released in 2005 could display ambient information from the internet. Unfortunately, “Violet closed down and Nabaztag was bought out by Mindscape then Aldebaran Robotics and in 2015 the servers were shut down leaving the bunnies dead as a brick”. With a new refurbishment kit, powered by a Raspberry Pi, you can bring these IoT displays back to life. - Adafruit Blog

Staying data compliant in the IoT

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union brings a unique set of data privacy challenges to all internet-connected products. Ludovic Rembert offers a few suggestions to keep your products and projects data compliant. - Embedded

More Satellite IoT Deployments

With SpaceX leading the way, a large number of IoT providers are launching satellites into space. - staceyoniot

NEW HARDWARE: Realtek RTL8722 Ameba Mini Board

Ameba RTL8722DM Mini Board (AMB 23) is a devkit for a different family of WiFi/BLE-integrated chipsets from RealTek. Some notable specs - high-performance 32-bit dual MCU, 5GHz WiFi, BLE5, and rich I/O peripherals. - Adafruit Store

NEW HARDWARE: Newt – a low-power, open-source, 2.7-inch IoT display

Newt is a battery-powered, always-on, wall-mountable display that can go online to retrieve weather, calendars, sports scores, to-do lists, quotes…really anything on the Internet! - Adafruit Blog

NEW HARDWARE: Nordic and Nowi Thingy:91 NH2, an Energy Harvesting Sensor Node

The NH2 is a sensor node development platform that combines Nordic’s Thing:91 with Nowi’s NH2 Energy Harvesting PMIC. - Nowi Energy

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

Adafruit Wippersnapper Beta Launches!

WipperSnapper is an interface for Adafruit IO, our incredibly easy-to-use IoT platform, designed to turn any WiFi-capable board into an IoT device without programming a single line of code.

WipperSnapper is now in Public Beta, you can get started with WipperSnapper by visiting io.adafruit.com/wippersnapper.

Over Engineered Smart Doorbell with Machine Learning

Instead of picking up a Ring doorbell, Victor Sonck created a machine-learning system to detect when his doorbell rings. - HackADay

Building an IoT Product — Continuous Battery Lifetime Testing

One of the key features of an internet-of-things device is its power consumption. Matthias Boesl of tado details his team’s journey integrating battery-life testing into their product’s CI/CD pipeline. - Medium

Buddy - Personal Home Office Assistant

Buddy is a hardware platform built around the M5Stack Core 2 which connects to a mobile app. The app “runs an algorithm to calculate productivity considering temperature, humidity, light and, IAQ” and re-calculates the productivity percentage as you re-arrange your home office environment. - Hackster.io

IoT News and More!

Beaming broadband across the Congo River

Alphabet’s X Company is transmitting broadband using an optical link between Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The optical link uses beams of light to send data over a river at up to 20 Gbps. - X.Company

A Horse-based Internet Speed Test

In an attempt to illustrate the contrasting internet speeds in Germany, reporters ran an experiment to see if data delivered via horse would arrive faster than over broadband. - HackADay

Silicon Labs ‘Works With’ Announcements

Silicon Labs held a “Works With” event last month to introduce new capabilities including new systems-on-chips operating in the sub-gigahertz spectrum, a unified SDK for their product line, and a new custom manufacturing service to enhance the security of modules from the foundry. - EETimes

Home Assistant’s Amber is a unified Smart Hub for your home

Home Assistant is crowdfunding for their Amber Smart Home Hub. Amber is a device that can be used to get started using Home Assistant without fussing with buying a single-board computer and installing software. Onboard is a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and Zigbee module which is compatible with the upcoming Matter IoT standard. - CrowdSupply

On the economic impact of Open Source Software and Hardware on the EU economy

The European Commission concluded a study which considered “if OSH is to follow the same development as OSS, it could constitute a cornerstone of the future Internet of Things (IoT)”. Their study listed relevant policy improvements to support a the EU economy gaining a competitive edge on the software and hardware industries. - 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

Bluetooth WFH Stress Monitor

If Slack notifications are making you anxious, this project monitors your heart rate (along with your office’s environment) and sends a notification when you need to take a break. - Hackster.io

Three WiFi Meters built for Arduino and ESP32

An art project which provides three ways to physically communicate information about the invisible WiFi networks all around you. - GitHub

Home Assistant Controller with MacroPad

Using a USB keypad to control IoT smart-things over a local home network. - Adafruit

Pet Food Monitor with Computer Vision

Determining the level of a cat’s food bowl using computer vision. - projects-raspberry

Hacking the Things Network Indoor Gateway

Tinkerman cracks open the Things Network Indoor Gateway, a low-cost indoor LoRaWAN gateway, and experiments with everything from adding an external antenna to peeking at the firmware. - Tinkerman

Smart Farming System

An indoor smart-agriculture system with automatic watering and an Adafruit.io dashboard for monitoring. - An indoor smart-agriculture system with automatic watering and an Adafruit.io dashboard for monitoring. - [GitHub](https://circuitdigest.com/microcontroller-projects/iot-based-smart-agriculture-moniotring-system)

Helping Parkinson’s Patients with AWS IoT

A device that can monitor Galvanic Skin Response, Microphone and Gyroscope data, and send it to AWS cloud. - Hackster

The 603-200 Watch

An ESP32-based watch project with 4 concentric circles of LEDs (200 total!). While inspired by TokyoFlash, this watch aims to be a “fully modern connected watch”. - HackaDay

IoT News and More!

Build a no-code IoT project with ESP32 and WipperSnapper

Last week, we added a new board to Adafruit.io WipperSnapper – our no-code IoT project interface for adafruit.io. WipperSnapper now supports the ESP32 platform. - Adafruit Blog

Can IoT Help Catch Wildfires In Time?

An investigation into IoT solutions for monitoring wildfires in the Western United States. - EETimes

Security flaws found in popular EV chargers using Raspberry Pi

The commercial use of the Raspberry Pi is introducing security issues with new EV chargers. - Adafruit Blog

Adafruit IO News

Get a beta invite to Adafruit.io WipperSnapper

Wippersnapper is a new no-code IoT interface for Adafruit.IO – it lets you turn any WiFi-capable board into an IoT device without any programming. Simply select what devices are connected to which pins on the hardware and it will auto-configure the firmware and even create an IO feed for visualization.

How can I get an invite to the Adafruit.io WipperSnapper Beta?

First – You’ll need a compatible board to use with WipperSnapper. WipperSnapper currently supports the following hardware: Metro ESP32S2, FunHouse ESP32-S2, MagTag ESP32S2, ESP32, PyPortal, Metro SAMD51+AirLift.

Then – Navigate to the official Adafruit Discord Server and post in #help-with-adafruit-io that you’d like a WipperSnapper beta invite. We’ll message you over Discord with further instructions!

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.