IoT Projects

Pool Temperature Monitor

It’s getting closer to summer in the States and that means cooling off in the pool. Blake built a pool temperature probe which is waterproof and shielded from the elements. Data from the probe is broadcast to Adafruit IO and displayed locally on a MagTag e-Ink IoT display. - hackaday.io

Machine Learning Package Detector

Build a machine learning package detector with Microsoft Lobe that sends you an email notification when a package is left at your door. - Adafruit Learning System

Freeform Weather Sculpture

A freeform circuit sculpture that displays the current weather forecast. - hackaday.io

Basics of Embedded and IoT Development with Python

An introduction to using Python for embedded IoT development. - kalebujordan.dev

FunHouse Motion Detecting Lights with LIFX Bulbs

Control WiFi Light bulbs with the (new!) Adafruit FunHouse WiFi home automation development board. - Adafruit Learning System

A DIY Extensible and Privacy-focused Smart Home Hub

Xasin is building an open source smart home hub to address privacy and interoperability concerns with existing smart home hubs. - hackaday.io

IoT IR Remote

A WiFi infrared remote control for your home entertainment system. - Adafruit Learning System

ESP32 Soil Moisture Sensor Probe

A soil moisture sensor with an ESP32 built-in for processing and networking. - hackaday.io

WiFi Motion Sensor

Motion sensor with email notifications. - hackaday.io

IoT News and More!

A look at the fragmented landscape for IoT Connectivity

An in-depth survey and analysis of the current wireless connectivity protocols. - Twilio Blog

Edge AI – What is it and What can it do for Edge IoT?

An overview of edge machine learning and its applications for IoT systems. - Seeed Studio Blog

Espressif Announces the ESP32-C6: a WiFi 6 + Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

Espressif announced a new SoC which contains a RISC-V core and added support for the WiFi 6 standard. - Espressif Blog

NEW Adafruit IoT Hardware: FunHouse WiFi Home Automation Development Board

FunHouse is the newest Adafruit IoT development board designed to make it easy to build home automation projects with little or no soldering. There are built in sensors for light, pressure, humidity and temperature sensors. Three JST PH plugs allow for quick connection of STEMMA boards that use digital or analog I/O, and there’s a STEMMA QT port for any I2C devices. - Adafruit

Adafruit IO News

Sneak Peek of Adafruit.IO Wippersnapper – Analog inputs working!

Wippersnapper is our upcoming 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 a IO feed you can then log and/or use to control other devices by triggering events or webhooks. We recently added analog inputs, and wanted to show off how it works with selecting an element (potentiometer) and the attached analog input pin, to getting it in as an MQTT feed…all in just about 1 minute! - Adafruit Blog

Adafruit IO Stats

Adafruit IO has 390,000+ total users! Here are the interesting stats from the last 30 days:

• Total Feeds: 640,000+ (and counting!).
• There are over 21,000+ feeds online as of the time of writing.
• There are an average of 6,000+ MQTT connections over the last 30 days.

Sign up for Adafruit IO (for free!) by clicking this link. Ready to upgrade? Click here to read more about Adafruit IO+, our subscription-based service. 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

Turning an ESP8266 Programmer Into an ESP Earring

You might not look at an ESP8266 programmer and think “wearable Ouija board planchette earring”, but Alex Glow did. Aside from having an Art Nouveau-esque silkscreen, this programming jig is both functional and wearable. - Hackster.io

Showcasing the Contentful blog with E-Ink, CircuitPython and IoT

Inspired by the “Moveable Type” art installation by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, Shy Ruparel utilized an Adafruit MagTag to build an e-Ink blog viewer for displaying the latest articles from Contentful’s blog - dev.to

Quickstart IoT - Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 with WiFi

The $4 Raspberry Pi Pico is quickly becoming a popular development board due its price, clock speed, and available GPIO. Easily add WiFi-connectivity to your RP2040 projects by following this new guide. - Adafruit Learning System

e-Ink COVID Vaccination Tracker

Vaccinations for COVID are well underway in most countries, and what better way to keep track of vaccinations for your country or region than with a battery-powered, refrigerator magnet that’s connected to the internet. - Adafruit Learning System

Shadow Box Internet Clock

An internet-enabled shadow box project that tracks the movement of the sun using NeoPixel. Check out the guide for the complete video, the lights add gorgeous colorful depth to your artwork. - Adafruit Learning System

Connecting LoRa Sensors to Google Home Assistant with Node-RED

Ben built a Node-RED workflow for sending data from LoRa connected temperature nodes to a Google Assistant. - Hardill.me.uk

Remote light switch with Blynk, Node-RED and MQTT

Using an ESP8266, a push-button, and two AA batteries, Mike built a physical switch to replace a voice-controlled switch. They built a new NODE-RED workflow to integrate their previous workflow with the light switch. - whatimadetoday

IoT News and More!

Particle Ethersim, Free Plan, and New Pricing Model

Particle announced a new global SIM card, a free plan for new developers and a revamped pricing model for their IoT platform. - Adafruit Blog

NEW Hardware: Adafruit Metro M7 with AirLift - Featuring NXP iMX RT1011

Get ready for our fastest Metro ever - the NXP iMX RT1011 microcontroller powers this board with a 500 MHz ARM Cortex M7 processor. There’s 4 MB of execute-in-place QSPI for firmware + disk storage and 128KB of SRAM in-chip. This development board also includes an AirLift WiFi Co-processor with TLS/SSL support. - Adafruit

Adafruit IO News

Adafruit IO Stats

Adafruit IO has 370,000+ total users! Here are the interesting stats from the last 30 days:

• Total Feeds: 612,000+ (and counting!).
• There are over 21,000+ feeds online as of time of writing.
• There are an average of 5,000+ MQTT connections over the last 30 days.

Sign up for Adafruit IO (for free!) by clicking this link. Ready to upgrade? Click here to read more about Adafruit IO+, our subscription-based service. 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

Keep Track of Critter Visitors with Birb Cam

Everett “had no idea how many critters visited (his) balcony planter box until (he) started working from home last March”. To capture these critters before they scurry away, Everett built an IP webcam aided by machine learning and computer vision to detect birds. - EverettsProjects

AIoT Water Meter

A single ESP32-CAM is used in conjunction with a neural network to read an analog water meter. This system snaps a picture of the water meter and uses a convolutional neural network to perform image recognition on the network and determines the reading. The system publishes readings to a graphical interface, also hosted by the same ESP32-CAM. - Github

Raspberry Pi 2040 meets LoRaWAN

Add LoRaWAN support to the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s new RP2040 chip. - LeMaRivaTech

DIY Home Assistant Sensor with CircuitPython

Build and program a sensor for Home Assistant using MQTT and CircuitPython. - Adafruit Learning System

Speaker Snitch spies on your Smart Speaker

Your smart speaker may be spying on you. Spy back by building a speaker snitch, a small box that monitors network traffic and flashes a LED whenever your smart speaker is sending data to the cloud. - Hackster.io

IoT News and More!

Results of 2020 MBed Developer Survey

ARM MBed published the results of their 2020 developer survey. Some interesting IoT findings are:

• BLE and cellular are popular among professionals while WiFi is popular among hobbyists.
• 50% of companies are increasing their BOM cost to protect against loss control over an IoT device
• Non-professional developers feel the largest challenge is setting up a development environment

Read the full survey results here…

Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect, a RP2040-based board with WiFi

The Raspberry Pi Pico’s RP2040 SoC is getting a dedicated board from Arduino - the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect. This board packs the RP2040 SoC, WiFi, Bluetooth ,and an IMU into a small form factor. - Tom’s Hardware

Hands-on with the RISC-V ESP32-C3

HackADay got their hands on pre-samples of the ESP32-C3 SoC. This new SoC intends to be an ESP8266 replacement with a faster CPU (160MHz RISC-V) and more RAM (400kB). - Tom’s Hardware

Adafruit IO News

What IS Adafruit IO Wippersnapper?

Adafruit IO Wippersnapper is a new way to create robust Internet of Things Projects without writing code. Wippersnapper is in early development and it’s not out yet. BUT, we will be publishing content about Wippersnapper whenever we have exciting new things to show you!

Watch the first demo of Wippersnapper on Youtube »>

Adafruit IO Stats

Adafruit IO has 370,000+ total users! Here are the interesting stats from the last 30 days:

• Total Feeds: 612,000+ (and counting!).
• There are over 21,700+ feeds online as of time of writing.
• There are an average of 5,00+ MQTT connections over the last 30 days.

Sign up for Adafruit IO (for free!) by clicking this link. Ready to upgrade? Click here to read more about Adafruit IO+, our subscription-based service. 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

A Thermostat for your Window

A Raspberry Pi project which integrates with your thermostat to display the perfect time to open your windows. - GitHub

Continuous Integration Test Status Light

Visually display the result of continuous integration tests with this cellular IoT status light. - Hackster

Google Calendar Event Display

Keep an eye on your schedule with this MagTag Google Calendar Event Viewer. This CircuitPython project uses the Google Calendar API to retrieve a list of the latest events from your Google Calendar and displays them on the MagTag’s e-Ink screen. - Adafruit Blog

The Internet of Christmas Trees

Prepare yourself for next years holiday season by building an internet-connected Christmas tree to send alerts when the tree needs watering. This detailed project writeup even dives into creating a parallel plate capacitor for monitoring the water level. - SpuriousEmissions

AI Freezer Monitor

A freezer monitor that uses machine learning to provide alerts if a freezer is about to fail. - Adafruit Learning System

Hoodie of Community Interacts with Tweets

This hoodie responds to emotive tweets by displaying a light show. - Hackster

IoT News and More!

A review of Blues Wireless - Cellular IoT at a Flat Rate

Blues Wireless is a new IoT company that offers a System-on-Module with GPS and Cellular, a cloud platform for managing cellular device fleets, and a flat $49 fee for 10 years of IoT cellular service. - Dev.to

Is the Amazon Echo Flex Mute Button Real?

Amazon’s new Echo Flex includes a button to mute the microphone. While most of us remain suspicious, electronupdate decided to reverse engineer the Echo Flex’s mute button to determine if it does more than turn on a red LED. - electronupdate

Samsung’s Galaxy Upcycling Program repurposes old phones as IoT devices

Samsung introduced a new recycling initiative at CES 2021 to convert your old Galaxy smartphone into an IoT device. - Adafruit Blog

Adafruit IO News

Adafruit IO Stats

Adafruit IO has 359,125 total users! Here are the interesting stats from the last 30 days:

• Total Feeds: 601,201 (and counting!).
• There are over 20,000 feeds online as of time of writing (Nov 23, 2020).
• There are an average of 4,700+ MQTT connections active 24/7.

Sign up for Adafruit IO (for free!) by clicking this link. Ready to upgrade? Click here to read more about Adafruit IO+, our subscription-based service. 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.

3,000 Thanks

Thanks to everyone reading this newsletter. We’re excited to have hit over 3,000 subscribers! We started this newsletter in May 2019 to highlight the latest projects and news for Adafruit’s IoT platform, Adafruit IO (io.adafruit.com). Since then, we’ve expanded this newsletter to not only focus on our offerings, but also include the best internet of things projects, news, and hardware from around the internet. Since then, we’ve published 29 issues - Adafruit Blog.

Our Favorite IoT Projects in 2020

We’ve dug into archives and sifted through everything published in 2020. Here are a few of our favorite projects from the 2020 IoT Monthly newsletter.

How to Pull your Own Covid-19 Data

We saw a large amount of IoT projects which track Covid-19 numbers, from the case count to amount of vaccines administered. HackADay published a guide back in April for scraping raw data about COVID19 from multiple data sources. If you’re building a way to monitor the total number of cases in your state or country, this guide provides reputable data sources along with Python code snippets - HackADay.

ISS-Tracking Globe Lamp

A 3D printed globe which uses a servo and laser-pointer to display where on Earth the International Space Station is hovering over - Instructables.

The Internet Monster

A cute monster which repeats what the Internet says. What could possibly go wrong? - Instructables.

Connected Weather Cloud Lamp

This is a fun project that plays with how to visualize information using only light and sound. What better way to have some fun with this than to make an Internet connected cloud that connects to an open source weather API? - Adafruit.

PyPortal Home Office Busy Display

Diana Perkins (@diana_perkins) built a display using a PyPortal to show when someone in their home offices is busy. It’s controlled using a “rails app running on a machine on our local network so we can trigger it even if we already sat down for a meeting” - Twitter.

UnifiedWater

UnifiedWater is an affordable DIY IoT smart water quality monitoring device which allows scientists and authorities to identify polluted bodies of water - Hackaday.io.

Designing a LoRaWAN Monitored Garden

czuvich on the Adafruit Forums demonstrates their Greenclay LoRaWAN Smart Garden project. It is able to monitor and manage an outdoor garden using LoRaWAN with an Arduino programmed microcontroller. It is a complete package which includes a dev kit, garden controller, and mobile app - Adafruit Forums.

Adafruit IO Stats

Adafruit IO has over 367,000 total users! Here are the interesting stats from the last 30 days:

• Total Feeds: 589,324 (and counting!).
• There are over 19,000 feeds online as of time of writing (Dec. 28, 2020).
• There are an average of 4,800+ MQTT connections active 24/7.

Sign up for Adafruit IO (for free!) by clicking this link. Ready to upgrade? Click here to read more about Adafruit IO+, our subscription-based service. 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.