IoT Projects

BLE-based Crowd Indicator for Small Stores

Smaller shops may not be able to hire extra employees to enforce or monitor social distancing. This solution by Ian Mercer tracks every Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) device nearby to figure out when the store is busy. - Hackster

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

Mesh WiFi Music-Reactive Light System

GlowFly is a WiFi connected, programmable and music reactive light system. When multiple nodes are combined, it is possible to span a mesh of WiFi connected devices which are synchronously reacting to music. - HackaDay

Electronic Security Lock using AWS Serverless

A small security lock you can text, powered by Amazon AWS Serverless. - Amazon

Vision Alert System with Azure IoT Edge and Jetson Nano

Build a vision system using a NVIDIA Jetson Nano with a webcam and the Azure Custom Vision service. This project sends an email alert to your inbox if an image has been identified. - henkboelman

Aquarium Automation with nRF52840

Aquarium automation system using a Feather nRF52840 and four extra FeatherWings. There’s an automatic fish-feeder and Raspbery Pi based fishpi monitors for temperature and lights. Scripts used in this project are open-source and on GitHub -Twitter

This Blog is Now Running on Solar Power

Lou Wrentius’ blog is now running on one solar panel and an old car battery. There’s a solar panel on his balcony “which is connected to a solar charge controller”. Clicking through to their blog, you can see a sidebar which shows the solar panel’s status. This widget runs on the same solar-powered Raspberry Pi which hosts the blog. If the weather is favorable, “the solar panel provides way more power than is required to keep the battery charged and run the Raspberry Pi”. -louwrentius

Dawn and Dusk Porch Lights

WiFi-enabled Wemo switch to turn off a porch-light at dawn and dusk. This switch includes an intelligent scheduler which obtains the location-specific sunset and sunrise times from the internet. - HackaDay

Wirelessly monitor G-Force from high-contact sports

Monitoring G-Force with a device attached to an ice-hockey helmet. Data is logged from the device to Adafruit IO. -Maker.io

Solar Powered Weather Station

Mark Komus built a solar-powered weather station that reports its recorded data to Adafruit IO, our easy-to-use IoT platform for everyone. A BME280 sensor monitors temperature, pressure and humidity. Sparkfun’s weather gauges are mounted at the top of the metal pole. - Adafruit

IoT News and More!

Use intent parsers to program your first voice AI

Programming a voice assistant for open-source home automation projects using the Mycroft voice assistant API. - OpenSource

New “Works with Google” program is Similar to Apple HomeKit

StaceyOnIoT points out that the new “Works with Google” program for smart-home devices is similar to Apple HomeKit, both services rope users into an vendor-specific ecosystem. - StaceyOnIoT

Alexa Connect Kit (ACK) Chipset Released

Amazon detailed a new Espressif-powered chipset which enables “WiFi, Bluetooth LE and all the software needed for Alexa control”. - Amazon

Adafruit IO

Adafruit IO Update: New Trigger Functionality

The Adafruit IO team has released some changes to Adafruit IO, our easy-to-use-internet of things platform. First is an update to Scheduled Triggers. Scheduled triggers now have a much more robust option to scheduling. If you’re familiar with cron scheduling, you’ll be familiar with this new system. You can schedule based on a number of new time and date options.

We’ve also added the ability for reactive triggers to email a value based on the feed that is being acted on, or now you can also update the value of any of your feeds from that trigger. For example, if the ‘humidity’ in your house is > 50%, you could update another, ‘dehumidifier’ feed to set the value to “ON”.

Finally, we’ve made further system changes that should improve the performance of Adafruit IO for all users.

Read more about all the changes here…

Adafruit IO Stats

Adafruit IO has 338,708 total users! Here are the interesting stats from the last 30 days:

• Total Feeds: 529,571 (and counting!).
• There are over 17,000 feeds online as of time of writing (July 30 2020).
• There are an average of 4,000+ 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.

Scheduled Triggers Update

We’ve updated scheduled triggers to support webhooks. You can now choose where to post your data, as well as which feed value is posted.

Reactive Triggers Update

We’ve also updated the webhook functionality on reactive triggers and now you can choose which feed is posted. Previously the only option was to post the value of the feed being reacted upon, but now any feed is available as an option to post the value to your destination.

Get in touch with us on the Adafruit IO forums or on Discord if you have any questions.

Hello IO community! Over the last few weeks we’ve released some changes to Adafruit IO that should be useful to everyone using the platform.

Scheduled Triggers Update

Scheduled triggers now have a much more robust option to scheduling. If you’re familiar with cron scheduling, you’ll be familiar with this new system. You can schedule based on a number of new time and date options. Previously we allowed scheduling based on increments such as 30 minutes, or 1 week. We now allow thing such as “Tuesdays at 9pm” or “At 2:00 PM, only on Friday”, or “Every 4 hours”, or “At 1:00 PM, every 7 days”.

In addition, scheduled triggers will now account for your time zone if you set it in your Adafruit Account profile. The default time zone is UTC.

Also, previously the only action option was to have a value emailed. We’ve now also added the ability for scheduled triggers to update another feed. An example of this would be to update a feed every 30 minutes with a “RESET” value to reset a system. There are many different possibilities!

Reactive Triggers Update

We’ve also added the ability for reactive triggers to email a value based on the feed that is being acted on, or now you can also update the value of any of your feeds from that trigger. For example, if the ‘humidity’ in your house is > 50%, you could update another, ‘dehumidifier’ feed to set the value to “ON”.

We think these updates are going to be quite useful, and are excited to see what you can come up with. This was a very large change in our system, and we anticipate there could be bugs here and there. Please feel free to report any bugs or issues you run across in our forum.

Trigger Changes

We’ve also made a few changes that span both triggers.

Triggers will be automatically disabled if they fail 5 times in a row. A failure could happen for any number of reasons, but we will add a new message to the triggers to let you know why they failed, as well as email you that the trigger has been disabled.

Emails are now limited to IO+ users (scheduled triggers created before 2020/07/14 are grandfathered and will remain active). This is largely because it costs us money to send emails. Reactive Trigger emails were always IO+ only, but we’ve expanded this to scheduled triggers as well (now that scheduled triggers have the ability to publish to feeds, this is free for all users).

Platform Upgrades

We’ve made some further system changes that should improve the performance of IO for all users. It may not be noticeable, but we are continuing to upgrade our backend systems, and improve performance and stability.

Get in touch with us on the Adafruit IO forums or on Discord if you have any questions.

We have updated the Adafruit IO SSL/TLS certificate. If you are having issues connecting, please ensure you have the latest Adafruit IO Arduino library version by navigating to the Arduino Library Manager (from the Arduino IDE, navigate to: Sketch -> Include Library -> Manage Libraries):

The certificate is fingerprinted in that library and you will have issues connecting if that library is out of date. The current version with the latest fingerprint is 3.7.0. There also an example that was updated in the Adafruit MQTT Library, we’ve updated this library too.

If you are using an ATWINC1500 module, you’ll need to update the certificate built into the module. Please follow these instructions on this Learning System Guide for step-by-step instructions…

In the future, we will announce this much further in advance to ensure everyone is aware of the scheduled certificate updates to reduce downtime. The next update will be in approximately 2 years.

If you had any significant downtime or are having issues getting connected again, please reach out to us and we can assist you.

IoT Projects

Microcontroller-based Star Trek TNG operational display

Darian Johnson built a Star Trek: The Next Generation inspired terminal that displays the weather, indoor temperature, volatile organic compound strength, fitness information, and more. This is one of the nicest-looking personal smart-terminals we’ve seen and even features a resistor color-code chart and a current measurement tool. - HackADay

Fermenters Friend – Home Brewing Temperature Monitor

After making a brew, one needs to “let it ferment, trying to control the temperature range from an ideal of around 18-22 C”. They used a Cheeseboard ESP8266 development board to monitor the brew’s temperature as it ferments and display it on a LCD and online. - Adafruit

Vintage Terminal Home Automation Home

Repurposing a ADM-3A terminal as a home automation hub and display. - HackADay

DIY Alexa-Controlled Air Conditioner

Summer is heating up in the United States and this DIY solution allows you to simulate the IR commands of an air conditioner remote control using an ESP8266. The ESP8266 is connected to HTTP/AWS so it can receive and translate Alexa commands to control your air conditioner. - EspressIf

Kindle Home Assistant Interface

Repurpose your kindle as an e-ink display for your Home Assistant setup. -GitHub

Minecraft Friend Notification Sign

This internet-connected sign lights up whenever your friends are online in your favorite Minecraft server. - Youtube

ESP32 Micropython Sensor and Web Server

ESP32-powered MicroPython sensor node also serves temperature data on its own web server. How2Electronics

IoT News and More!

free5GC - an Open-Source 5G Mobile Core Network

The free5GC project is building an open-source 5G mobile core (5GC) network. - Free5GC

ClusterDuck Protocol - LoRa, WiFi, and Bluetooth Mesh Network

The ClusterDuck Protocol is an open source firmware for mesh network internet-of-things devices based on LoRa radio and can include WiFi and Bluetooth compatibility. This is an interesting potential alternative for Particle’s IoT BLE Mesh users. - ClusterDuck

GNUHealth in a Box: Deploying hospital health systems with a Raspberry Pi

GNU Health, a “health and hospital information system” now has an image which can be installed on Raspberry Pi’s in remote areas without internet, nursing homes or laboratories. - GNUHealth

Adafruit IO Stats and more!

Adafruit IO has 332,834 total users! Here are the interesting stats from the last 30 days:

• Total Feeds: 516,432 (and counting!).
• There are over 17,600 feeds online as of time of writing (June 25, 2020).
• There are an average of 4,605 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.