IoT Projects

Helping Harry’s Heart

Adam Taylor built a remote monitoring system to monitor his dog’s respiration rate to help the vet to adjust his heart medication. They used a X4M200 respiration sensor fitted to Harry’s (the dog) harness. Adam used Adafruit IO to send the dog’s heart rate to the internet, privately. “Along with [the] graphical view, I can also see the time stamped data” to share with “the cardiac specialist at Harry’s next appointment. - Hackster.io

CircuitPython BLE Remote Control On/Off Switch

rdagger has “multiple computers around the house, and sometimes they need to be rebooted remotely.”. Instead of manually opening the locked closet and rebooting their NAS, rdagger opted for a different approach. They built a BLE peripheral which “attaches to the front so the server can be turned on remotely from outside the closet”. - Read the guide on the Adafruit Learning System

Hacking the Sonos Ikea Symfonisk into a High-Quality Amplifier

Ikea released a $99 SONOS-compatible speaker, but a plastic enclosure can’t hold a candle to a pair of high-quality wooden speakers. Ben Hobby grabbed some tools and (literally) hacked one apart to connect it to his bookshelf speakers so you don’t have to. - Makezine.

PyPortal IoT Plant Monitor with AWS IoT and CircuitPython

This smart-planter monitors your plant’s vitals on the PyPortal’s screen, logs data to Amazon AWS IoT, and sends an email to your inbox when your plant needs to be watered! Using Amazon AWS IoT with CircuitPython allows you to prototype internet-of-things projects faster than ever before. With CircuitPython, you’re able to instantly provision your device for AWS IoT by dragging and dropping certificates/keys. - Adafruit Learning System

Mini Smart Home with Huzzah, HASSio and Crickit

The Mini Smart Home is a test bed that can let you move one step closer to making a truly smart Smart Home. When finished, you will have a completely independent system that hosts a customizable browser based User Interface, a device management system, usage and data logging, advanced automation tools, and user account security. This is all done with a Smart Home server OS called Home Assistant. - Adafruit Learning System

Around the Internet – IoT News and Links

Tearing Down Quirky’s Egg-Minder

A teardown of the (now defunct) Quirky’s Egg-Minder reveals a well-designed IoT product before the ESP8266 was “a thing” - HackADay

Debugging the ESP32 ESP-IDF with a Segger JLink

Using the ESP32 as a WiFi Coprocessor (like Adafruit AirLift boards running the excellent nina-fw firmware) is becoming more popular. Instead of printf()’ing your way through ESP-IDF and mbed - this post details a method of using the Eclipse IDE and a JLink debugger. - DZone

Amazon’s Quest to put Alexa everywhere

Aside from the usual smart-speaker, Amazon released a bevy of new hardware supporting their Alexa voice assistant earlier this month. This hardware ranges from a wearable wing to Alexa-compatible eyeglasses. But what’s the goal of releasing all this hardware so quickly? - VentureBeat

Why Engineering Teams Are Shutting Down Industrial IoT Projects

Despite the previous accomplishments of their profession, engineering teams are unexpectedly shutting down industrial IoT projects at an alarming rate. But why now? It seems like IoT, as an industry, is evolving daily with new hardware advances. - DZone

MCCI Catena 4618 is a Cortex M0+ LoRaWan + sensors in a Feather footprint

MCCI has released the Catena 4618, a complete single-board IoT device and sensors for LoRaWAN projects.

Based on the Murata CMWX1ZZABZ-078, and designed to be compatible with the MCCI Catena 44xx and 46xx family and the Adafruit Feather family of development boards and accessories, the Catena 4618 is a great platform for LoRaWAN investigation and deployment. It works well with The Things Network, or any LoRaWAN 1.0 or 1.1 network in the 865 to 923 MHz range.

The board is available from the MCCI online store and more information is available on the MCCI website.

NoCAN - a new type of wireless sensor network

Transmitting data over SPI/I2C wires does not work well for long distances, you can transmit longer distances but only when reducing the frequency. The NoCAN platform allows creation of a reliable sensor network with nodes connected through a CAN bus. It includes a dynamic-address-assignment scheme from a node manager when it’s bootstrapped (just like DHCP). - Omzlo

ESP32 and Raspberry Pi Zero W in Space

The APEX experiment brought two ESP32s and a Raspberry Pi Zero into space to evaluate faster embedded computing options for space-flight.

The main board included two ESP32s and a Raspberry Pi Zero W, running resinOS / balenaOS, an operating system designed to run parallel Docker containers and optimized for IoT fleet management.

Read more on HackADay…

MQTT Security 101

The internet-of-thing’s favorite low-power protocol, MQTT, doesn’t require any security measures. But it’s 2019 and we should enforce best practices, this article dives into the vulnerabilities, and security measures to take from a broker or client perspective. - Medium

The ESP32MX-E is a robust ESP32 platform

Between an active community, a low price-point, and ongoing development, the ESP32 is an attractive choice for connecting internet-of-things projects to the internet. The the esp32MX-E takes the ESP32 one-step further by adding a STMicroelectronics STM32F030F4 and Ethernet support. This project is coming soon, sign up on the project Crowd Supply page to receive updates.

Scientists tracking eagle’s migration patterns rack up roaming charges

Russian scientists tracking the migration patterns of eagles suddenly ran out of money when they found the eagles were migrating hundreds of miles away to Pakistan and Iran, racking up thousands of dollars of roaming charges. While this is funny, it’s also a scenario one should consider when building mobile IoT projects. - BBC News

Track Ocean Currents with the Maker Buoy Kit

The Maker Buoy Project’s Arduino-based drifting buoy is the “Internet of Things applied to the ocean”. If you’re an oceanographer or marine biologist looking for a robust, open-source, buoy system - look no further than the Maker Buoy’s prebuilt kits. Maker Buoy now offers pre-populated PCBs, complete kits and bare-PCB hardware on their store.

Adafruit IOT Updates

New Adafruit IO Block - Multi-line text block

If you have an Adafruit IO Feed containing a lot of text (tweets, packed data from one sensor, etc.), you can now format and display your feeds on your Adafruit IO dashboard using a multi-line text block. – Visit your Adafruit IO Dashboard to try it out now

SmartiPi Touch 2 - Stand for Raspberry Pi 7” Touchscreen Display

If you’re running a smart-home setup and want to build an inexpensive central monitoring display, the SmartiPi Touch 2 is a well-designed stand for the Raspberry Pi 7” touchscreen display. Run Chromium in kiosk mode with the page set to Home Assistant or your Adafruit IO dashboard and you’ll have a touch-enabled smart-thing display - visit the Product Page here.

Coming Soon - Adafruit Feather STM32F405 Express

The new STM32F405 Feather (video) that Adafruit designed runs CircuitPython at a blistering 168MHz – our fastest CircuitPython board ever! We’ve tried it out with an AirLift Breakout and it’s incredibly quick. This may be the CircuitPython Feather you want powering your IoT project. The Feather SM32F405 Express is not yet available - sign up to be notified when it is put in stock.

What is Adafruit.IO?

Adafruit.io has over 14,000+ active users in the last 30 days and 850+ Adafruit IO Plus subscribers. 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.

Adafruit IoT Updates

Adafruit IO Update: Set icons on your gauge and text blocks!

Settable Icons and decimal controls are now available for your Adafruit IO Gauge and Text elements! - Visit your Adafruit IO Dashboard to try it out now

New IoT Hardware: TinyPICO ESP32 Development Board

The smallest, most feature-rich ESP32 dev board has arrived at Adafruit…

There are quite a few ESP32 boards on the market, but they all require you to compromise on one or more features. Some don’t have on-board battery management, while some do but they don’t have low deep sleep current. Others have great low-power modes, but are large and not breadboard-friendly, and none of them have extra RAM unless you go for a more expensive and larger WROVER-powered board. We just weren’t happy with the status quo - we wanted to have our cake and eat it too! So we designed the smallest un-compromising ESP32 development board in the world, and then went a step further and gave it 4 MB of extra RAM, an on-board RGB LED, and more juice with a 700 mA 3.3 V regulator.

Visit the product page to learn more…

Coming soon: BrainCraft HAT for Raspberry Pi 4

We’ve started to design a BrainCraft HAT for Raspberry Pi and other Linux computers. It has a 240×240 TFT display for inference output, slot for camera connector cable for imaging projects, a 5 way joystick and button for UI input, left and right microphones, stereo headphone, stereo speaker out, three RGB DotStar LEDs, two 3 pin STEMMA connectors on PWM pins so they can drive NeoPixels or servos, and Grove/STEMMA/Qwiic I2C port. This should let people build a wide range of audio/video AI projects while also allowing easy plug-in of sensors and robotics! The BrainCraft has a wide variety of connectivity methods:

Wireless flexibility: WiFi, cellular, Bluetooth LE Works with adafruit.io, of course!

Visit the product page to learn more…

IoT Projects

a Hello World for ESP-NOW

ESP-NOW is “yet another protocol developed by Espressif, which enables multiple devices to communicate with one another without using Wi-Fi”. If you want to try out ESP-NOW right now, Jake Wachlin built an ESP-NOW example with example code on GitHub (you’ll need two ESP32 devices). He also took an extra step and performed latency and reliability testing from his city apartment (a very busy 2.4GHz spectrum).

Smart Outlet with MKR WiFi1010 and Adafruit IO

Smart plug to control a lamp using Google’s voice assistant with an Arduino MKR WiFi 1010 and a 5V relay - Hackster.io

Upgrade the ESP32 Firmware on your AirLift

Adafruit ships a variety of products which use the ESP32 as a WiFi co-processor with a variant of the Arduino nina-fw core. If you want to keep the firmware on your ESP32 WiFi co-processor up-to-date, you’ll need to update the firmware on the ESP32. This guide will teach you how to to turn your board into a USB-to-Serial converter to flash new firmware to your ESP32 – no extra hardware required! - Adafruit Learning System

Live-stream anywhere with an ESP32-CAM

Set up a streaming web server with face recognition and detection in less than five minutes with Arduino IDE (we sell a similar ESP32 camera module here) - via Maker.Pro

Set up Home Assistant with a Raspberry Pi

Create your own secure, smart-home-hub with HASSio, MQTT, Node RED and More!

Home Assistant is an open source operating system for a localized Smart Home Hub. Basically it works like IFTTT or Samsung Smart Things, but without having to send your data out onto the internet. This means that you have total control over your data, limit the amount of internet traffic from your smart devices, and tighten up security.

Read the guide on the Adafruit Learning System…

Fried Desk Lamp Reborn: Rebuilding a device with connectivity

Sean Boyce ran 220 Volts AC through his “fancy Xiaomi Smart Lamp”’s 12VDC transformer. He went about repairing it, but didn’t trust “installing another (potentially data-harvesting) app on [his] phone just to control a lamp] and thus wrote a protocol for the NodeMCU fan controller. - via HackADay

Running TensorFlow Lite Object Recognition on the Raspberry Pi 4

Want to up your robotics game and give it the ability to detect objects? Maybe implement a security camera that can see and identify certain items? Now that the Raspberry Pi is fast enough to do machine learning, adding these features is fairly straightforward. Take this guide a step further and interface image recognition with your favorite cloud IoT service. - via Adafruit Learning System

IoT Anti-Addiction Lockbox

Lock away your vices in an IoT anti-addiction lockbox. Aside from the internet-controlled lock, this box can detect the physical presence of an item using an ultrasonic sensor and a digital scale. - via Instructables

Monitoring 3D Printer Filament Humidity with low power radio

Dr. Scott M. Baker built small, wireless sensor nodes, to verify the storage of vacuum sealed “PrintDry” 3D Filament Storage containers. The sensor nodes transmit data using low-powered SYN115 radio modules, which are received by a Raspberry Pi connected to the internet.  - via smbaker.com

Indoor Air Quality Monitor with PyPortal and Particle

Measuring the air quality in a your region can help you understand the world around you,

More than two billion people worldwide continue to depend on solid fuels, including fuels and coal, for their energy needs. Cooking and heating with fuels on open fires or traditional stoves result in high levels of indoor air pollution. Indoor smoke contains a range of health-damaging pollutants, such as small particles and carbon monoxide, and particulate pollution levels maybe 20 times higher than accepted guideline values.

This is a pretty through build - a Particle Argon acts as an environmental monitor, sends data to Particle Cloud, is logged to long-term Google Firebase storage, and displayed locally on a PyPortal. - via electromaker.io

eAgar: Large-scale plant monitoring with LoRa

eAgar is a system for monitoring conditions of agriculture fields. Each sensor device is plug-and-play (just initial device provisioning is required) thanks to using LoRa communication to an outdoor multi-channel LoRa gateway.

With more information from fields, farmers can predict appearance of disease and prevently treat their plants. That will help them to reduce costs, reduce damages on plants, increase quality of crops and increase yields. Using chemical agents on clever way, in smaller quantities, will enable to customers get healthier food.

Read more about this project on Hackaday.io…

Smart Gate - DIY’ing Secure Facility Access

Michael is building a smart security control gate to control who accesses the Institute Univeritaire De La Cote in Cameroon. - via Hackaday.io

Around the Internet - IoT News and Links

The “S” missing from IoT is for Security

Digi-Key and Adafruit have teamed up to present answers to the idiosyncrasies of properly connecting things to the internet or IoT – (AKA Internet of Things). When you see that the “S” is missing from IoT, that is because there is a large amount security missing from modern day internet connected devices. - Watch “All the Internet of Things: The S in IoT is for Security” on Youtube

Amazon Sidewalk: a new 900MHz Protocol

Amazon is taking a plunge into the Low-Power IoT (LPIOT) pool and announced they’re working on a protocol named Amazon Sidewalk. This protocol sits on the 900MHz frequency band and will link IoT devices together. Much like LoRaWAN, it supports secure OTA updates but also geolocation. There’s not a lot of information about this protocol, it won’t be out for a while (at least a year for the SDK) and the first device will be named Fetch is a locator which can clip onto your dog’s collar.  - via Amazon DayOne This protocol does have it’s skeptics though - Kyle Wiggers wrote an article on VentureBeat detailing that he feels “Amazon Sidewalk’s success is Anything but Assured” - via VentureBeat

ATECC608 Cryptographic Co-Processor gets a CircuitPython Library

The ATECC608 is the latest crypto-auth chip from Microchip, and it uses I2C to send/receive commands. Once you ‘lock’ the chip with your details, you can use it for ECDH and AES-128 encrypt/decrypt/signing. There’s also hardware support for random number generation, and SHA-256/HMAC hash functions to greatly speed up a slower micro’s cryptography commands.

We’ve updated this guide to include instructions for wiring and using our new Adafruit CircuitPython ATECC library. This library can interface with your ATECC608 breakout and perform AES-128 signing, random number generation, SHA-256 hashing, Certificate Signing Request generation and more!

Follow along with the Adafruit Learning System Guide here…

NEW Book: Learning IoT with Python and Raspberry Pi

A new book on learning IoT using a Raspberry Pi with Python offers a full IoT curriculum for a person or a classroom. Some of the book’s contents include important internet-connected topics such as:

• Control a servo using classes
• Upload data to the cloud
• Learn how to access a database using SQL statements
• Deploy a home monitor system that uses the Raspberry Pi Camera and a PIR sensor circuit. Upload pictures to a web server in the cloud and access the pictures on a web page.
• Control a robot using a multi-threaded application

Pre-order the book on Barnes and Noble’s website…

Comparing the ESP32 to the ESP32-S2

With more ESP32-S2 engineering samples in the wild, maker.pro published an analysis comparing the ESP32 to the new ESP32-S2. Xose Pérez notes that:

With the new ESP32-S2, Espressif is trying to fill a gap between the ESP8266 and the ESP32, both in features and price. The ESP32-S2 is not an ESP32 killer. Instead, it’s more an ESP8266 killer.

RPiAPI: a Lightweight WSGI API for RPi GPIO

Interact with your Raspberry Pi using RPiAPI - a Lightweight API built on top of RPI GPIO - via Hackaday.io

What is Adafruit.IO?

Adafruit.io has over 14,000+ active users in the last 30 days and 830+ Adafruit IO Plus subscribers. 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.

Up until now you’ve been able to share feeds with other Adafruit IO makers, publishing and subscribing from our HTTP and MQTT APIs, but it’s been difficult (i.e., impossible) to actually use them anywhere else on the Adafruit IO site. That has changed!

We have added Adafruit IO shared feeds to feed listings on your main feeds page and on the dashboard block editor so you can now see all of the feeds you have access to when you’re browsing Adafruit IO. That means quick insight into feeds that were shared with you, the level of access you have (read or read and write) at a glance, and their latest values.

Shared feeds are listed at the bottom of your main feeds page.

We’ve also added shared feeds to the dashboard block editor so that you can build hybrid dashboards with feeds from multiple Adafruit IO accounts. Shared feeds get the same instant updates as feeds you own, and if you have read/write access to the shared feeds, you’ll be able to send data to them from dashboards you create.

Shared feeds are listed at the bottom on the “Select Feeds” screen of the block editor.

Please stop by the forums or our channel on the Adafruit Discord server and show us what you’re making or to reach out if you have any questions!

Adafruit IOT Updates

Adafruit IO Update: New User Interface!

We’ve updated the Adafruit IO user interface to match recent changes on the Adafruit website and the Adafruit Learning System. Here’s a shortlist of changes:

• New User Interface!
• Reorganized menus
• Quick links to access your data faster
• New footer - the footer from adafruit.com was moved over. The new footer includes links to API documentation, forums, and the support page.

This is a pretty big update to the IO user interface, one that we hope makes it quicker to get around and easier to find what you’re looking for. Please stop by our channel on the Adafruit Discord server and reach out if you have any questions!

Read the full changelog with screenshots!.

New IoT LoRaWAN Hardware: The Things Indoor Gateway!

Meet the affordable 8 Channel LoRa gateway from TTN, The Things Indoor Gateway! Simple name for a straight-to-the point product. It’s the new low cost, indoor multi-channel LoRaWAN gateway designed by The Things Network, so you know it will work perfectly with TTN. Make a free account, plug it in, follow the easy step-by-step installation instructions and you’ve got yourself a LoRaWAN to Internet gateway in under 5 minutes. No setup or usage fees.

Visit the product page to learn more.

New IoT Hardware: M5Stick-C Pico

Jam-packed with a Wi-Fi & Bluetooth powered ESP32, USB interface, Li-Poly battery and charge circuitry, 0.96” color TFT display, various sensors (IR transmitter, microphone, 6-DoF IMU sensor) all integrated inside, buttons, and more! You can plug Grove sensors into one end, or use the 0.1” header sockets on the other, to connect additional sensors or actuators. It’s perfect for making ultra-small IoT projects or wearables.

Visit the product page to learn more…

IoT Projects

Stream Deck controlled RGB Message Panel using Adafruit IO

Easily display status messages with a Stream Deck and an RGB Matrix Panel.

This project uses a custom Stream Deck plugin to communicate directly with the Adafruit IO REST API. It works by posting a specific value to a feed and each button will post a different value to the feed allowing you to easily change messages.

Read the guide on the Adafruit Learning System here.

PyPortal Daily UV Index Display

UV is what gives you vitamin D and a tan… and a sunburn… and, well, skin cancer. It’s a case of a little being ok but too much being pretty bad. Like bacon. You can now check the UV index at a glance on your PyPortal.

Read the guide on the Adafruit Learning System here.

PyPortal IoT Plant Monitor with Google Cloud IoT Core and CircuitPython

Turn your black thumb into a green thumb by building an internet-enabled plant monitoring system by combining Google Cloud IoT Core with CircuitPython.

Read the guide on the Adafruit Learning System here.

Consumers Should Immediately - a live feed of recalled product info on a boot

Named “Consumers Should Immediately…“, it displays a live data feed from The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (USCPSC) to randomly display thousands of products recalled for reasons such as fire, electrocution, entrapment, choking and a variety of other unintended dangers. - ExtraSleepy.com.

3D Printed LoRA Remote

Via back7.co:

This is meant to be a simple remote control for LoRa-based robotics projects. It runs CircuitPython

Live Train Station Departure Sign for your Desk

Build your own UK train station platform departure display (next train indicator) with live data using a Raspberry Pi Zero, OLED display and 3D printed case - a cool (and practical!) desktop gadget - balena.io

Around the Internet - IoT News & Links

Ludzinc has been building a IoT Garage Door Opener since 2013, and blogged about Easier ESP development (learn from their four years of frustration). It’s an incredibly comprehensive post discussing everything from websockets to selecting proper hardware.

The OpenHAK is an open-source fitness tracker which can count your steps and measure your heart rate. Step counting is done by a Bosch BMI160, and the heart rate sensing is done with a Maxim MAX30101. The whole thing is driven and built around a Simblee BLE radio module.

Officially build an Alexa Gadget with your Raspberry Pi to control a RGB LED - Alexa on GitHub

Pwavrobot is building a dual esp32 feather-format board, just for fun.

Icarus, a new IoT Board with the latest nRF91 integrates GPS and Cellular (LTE-M, MB-IoT) - Actinius

The Next Wave of IoT Bluetooth devices might not have batteries thanks to Bluetooth 5 and Energy Harvesting - EETimes

What is Adafruit IO?

Adafruit.io has over 14,000+ active users in the last 30 days and over 830+ Adafruit IO Plus subscribers. 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.

We have updated the Adafruit IO user interface to take advantage of recent changes to https://www.adafruit.com and https://learn.adafruit.com along with a batch of internal changes that improve the size of initial code downloaded when you visit the site–total script size was reduced by about 15%–and speed up the initial page load when you visit a page on https://io.adafruit.com.

The biggest change you’ll notice is a reorganization of our menus. The old menu from the left hand side of the screen is now split between a new header (top of page) with Adafruit-styled “flyout” menus linking to your pages within the site and a footer (bottom of page) with links to information about Adafruit IO.

The header includes links to other Adafruit sites and to other pages in io.adafruit.com.

Click on a menu heading, like “Profile”, to show links to the rest of your data on Adafruit IO.

Quick links to your data

The new Feeds, Dashboards, and Triggers menus also include quick links to your most recently updated feeds, dashboards, and triggers.

Footer quotes!

Finally, we’ve brought the footer from Adafruit over. It sits at the bottom of every page and is where you can find links to our support page, quick guides, API documentation, and the feedback form.

This is a pretty big update to the IO user interface, one that we hope makes it quicker to get around and easier to find what you’re looking for. Please stop by the forums or our channel on the Adafruit Discord server and reach out if you have any questions!