IoT Projects

Face Tracking and Identification with Walle-ng

Anton built a robot inspired by the Pixar Movie Wall-E. If a face is detected (using the OpenCV Facial Recognition Demo), activity is logged and a notification is sent to an Amazon Web Service API Gateway and distributed as an SMS by AWS’s Simple Notification Service. - Hackster.io

Data Logging Zero to Hero with CircuitPython and MQTT

Robin Cole published a tutorial which navigates through the basics of creating a CircuitPython temperature logging device. First, you use the Mu editor to plot your data and verify it’s correct. Then add WiFi Connectivity using a local MQTT broker and CircuitPython’s MiniMQTT module. Finally, add an MQTT sensor to Home Assistant so the data is graphed on a web dashboard. - Hackster.io

ISS-Tracking Globe Lamp

This project uses an Open Notify API notification called ISS Location Now to track the International Space Station. A WeMos D1 grabs and parses the data. Then it tells a servo where to place a laser-pointer on a 3D-printed globe. - Instructables

Disaster-Radio - an off-grid, solar-powered mesh network

disaster.radio is a work-in-progress long-range, low-bandwidth wireless disaster recovery mesh network powered by the sun.

What I Learned Building an Indoor Air Quality Monitor with Adafruit IO

There are lessons to learn from every electronics project. Even a sensor node can quickly become complicated. Andy Bradford wrote up his experience (and provided free, open source code on GitHub) in building a logging platform. - Andy Bradford

PyPortal Voice Controlled Smart Switch and Time Display

We’ve written about this project in a previous IoT Monthly before, but it was only a sneak preview. The PyPortal Voice Controlled Smart Switch and Time Display is now on the Adafruit Learning System as a guide - Adafruit Learning System

Sending Arduino Data to Google Sheets using the Google Cloud Platform

Building an Arduino sketch to send data to Google Sheets using the Google Cloud Platform. - DZone

IoT News and More!

Adafruit joins the LoRa Alliance

Adafruit is thrilled to announce that we have joined the LoRa Alliance! I asked Ladyada why we joined this alliance…

“Humans have done a great job of connecting people in dense populations like cities or buildings – WiFi and Cellular are ubiquitous technologies that connect people, machines and sensors. The future is to connect people wherever they are, and that’s where LoRa has so much promise. We think LoRa and LoRaWAN are the best way to solve last-mile connectivity for Industrial and Agricultural IoT” – Limor “Ladyada” Fried.

Read the full blog post here…

Ring Cameras are Ransomed

December 2019 was the month of Ring insecurity. First, videos appeared where hackers spoke to families through their Ring cameras: “We would like to notify you that your account has been terminated by a hacker.” The voice then says, “Pay this 50 bitcoin ransom…”.  Ring asserted that their investigation found that the family used an email/password combination which was exposed in an unrelated data breach. @fs0c131y on Twitter did a deep-dive into Ring’s iOS/Android application. They found the application to leak geographic details of cameras through their API, Ring does not require authentication for video/photo alerts and the application does not implement rate-limiting for logging in. It’s likely that hackers are running automatic bots against the login with exposed usernames/passwords from previous breaches.

FBI releases a statement for building a digital defense for the Internet of Things

The FBI has suggested network security measurements for those with IoT devices on their network. In short: change factory settings/passwords, isolate IoT devices to their own network, and update your devices regularly. - FBI

LoRaWAN and Wi-Fi: Made for Each Other

Remi Lorrain wrote that “WiFi and LoRaWAN work well together as an end-to-end solution in IoT applications and more.” - EETimes

Project Connected Home over IP: an Open Standard for Smart Home Devices

Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance and board members form a working group to develop an open standard for smart home devices - Project Connected Home

Ikea’s 2020 Smart Home Lineup is Unveiled

Ikea is planning on barreling into the smart-home area in 2020 with new bulbs, products and even a ZigBee gateway. - TheVerge

DZone’s IoT Predictions for 2020

Dzone published their 2020 IoT predictions, among them are: the edge gets smarter, evolving networks and protocols, AI Smart Homes connected to ISPs, increases in DIY Home Security installations, more hard-lined policies for BYOD, and new flexible electronic materials. - Part 1 and Part 2

The 2019 State of Responsible IoT Report

“With ThingsCon, we have devoted ourselves to working towards a ‘responsible IoT’. But what does that look like in the light of Surveillance Capitalism? With this years ‘responsible IoT Report’ – RioT for short – we wanted to find out.” - ThingsCon

HackADay SuperConference Talk on YouTube: Basic Device Security for Basic Needs

Kerry Sharfglass remarks that “In our IoT-ified world, device security is more important than ever, but not every hardware product needs to be secured like an ATM inside a missile. I will discuss basic design practices and implementation tricks which are easy to incorporate into your product and provide a solid baseline of security against casual adversaries.” - YouTube

Five Reasons to Upgrade to MQTT 5

The latest version of the IoT’s favorite stateless protocol has been out for a while. Here are five reasons to upgrade to it - IoTforAll

Actinus Environmental Sensor FeatherWing Released

Actinius’ Environmental Sensor FeatherWing measures temperature, humidity, pressure, and air quality. The Feather-compatible environmental sensor add-on also includes a Grove connector for use with any I2C-compatible microcontroller. It’s available for purchase from the actinius website and is in-stock at the time of writing.

OpenMV Cam H7 Plus

The OpenMV Cam is a small, low power, microcontroller board which allows you to easily implement applications using machine vision in the real-world. You program the OpenMV Cam in high level Python scripts (courtesy of the MicroPython Operating System) instead of C/C++. It’s currently in-production and will be in stock by March 2020. - OpenMV

Adafruit IoT Updates

New Adafruit IO Feature: Kiosk Mode for Dashboards

Adafruit IO Dashboards have a new “kiosk mode” URL that will launch the dashboard in a “no browsing mode” without any of the surrounding page. This is super-handy if you’re designing an exhibit or would like to use a Raspberry Pi + HDMI Display to monitor your Adafruit IO Feeds. Read our blog post to learn how to enable this feature on your dashboard right now…

New PyPortal Sizes: Meet the PyPortal Pynt and the PyPortal Titano

The PyPortal is our easy-to-use IoT device that allows you to create all the things for the “Internet of Things” in minutes. Adafruit has released the PyPortal Pynt, the little sister to our popular PyPortal - zapped with a shink ray to take the design from a 3.2” diagonal down to 2.4” diagonal screen. We’ve also released the PyPortal Titano, with an ATMEL (Microchip) ATSAMD51J20 plus an Espressif ESP32 Wi-Fi coprocessor with TLS/SSL support built-in. PyPortal Titano has a bigger 3.5″ diagonal 320 x 480 color TFT with resistive touch screen. Compare that to the original PyPortal’s 3.2” 240x320, there are twice the number of pixels! Also, Adafruit has updated the connector to be a reverse-friendly USB C connector.

Build a Mini Smart Home with the Smart Home Kit for Digi-Key IoT Studio

Automate your own adorable, IoT-enabled papier-mâché house. The small size of this build lets one explore wiring, user interaction, and firmware deployment without having to get a ladder out. After building this project, you can re-purpose it for your home or apartment. We’ve specifically selected components and sensors which are common in real-world IoT projects. You can also go further with this project, adding sensors to monitor different rooms in your home. Visit the product page for this kit on the Adafruit Website…

What is Adafruit IO?

Adafruit.io has over 14,000+ active users in the last 30 days and 880+ 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.

IoT Projects

Running ML on Particle Hardware, ML 101

Tensorflow Lite now runs on newer Particle devices! Brandon Satrom published a very detailed tutorial about running TFLite on Particle devices. - Particle

Do your chores or else I’ll cut off the internet!

AccidentalRebel is creating a device “that monitors and logs if my kids have done their chores and daily tasks. If not, their devices won’t have access to the internet.”. When their chores for the day are complete, their device will automatically re-connect them to the internet. - Hackaday.io

ESPRing Clock

ESPRing is a NeoPixel ring with an onboard ESP module. The ESP connects to WiFi and fetches the NTP time. - Hackaday.io

AutoHome - Universal Home Automation with Raspberry Pi

rirozizo is building a home automation system powered by a Raspberry Pi “to remotely control any possible home appliances without the use of proprietary hardware and apps”. They’re using the (free) Adafruit IO service as the MQTT broker and for data visualization. - Github

Voice-Controlled PyPortal Smart Switch

Dan the Geek is improving their PyPortal-based Smart Switch. They connected it to Adafruit IO’s IFTTT integration so they can turn a light on or off using voice commands over Alexa or Google Assistant. - Twitter

Evaluating Motion Sensors, Microwave v.s. PIR

Akarush wrote a detailed log of his evaluation for two motion sensors - a RCWL-0516 and a PIR motion sensor. The results? Each sensor has unique advantages and disadvantages. - Hackaday.io

Bluetooth-based Costume Props using Arduino and ESP32

Juan Carlos Jiménez hosted a costume party and integrated their costume with the house decorations. This BLE-powered costume prop is spooky. - JCJC-Dev

RGB Weather Strip

This RGB LED Strip changes color based on the weather forecast outside. - Hackaday

Code-less IoT Projects with Node-RED on Raspberry Pi

Les Pounder posted a tutorial about using the Node-RED development tool…

Node-RED is an awesome tool and anyone, yes anyone can make something with it. All you need is a web browser and a device with Node-RED. Node-RED uses JavaScript syntax, but we do not have to write any code, rather we link nodes together.

Around the Internet - IoT News

PWNing MBEDTLS on ESP32

LimitedResults found vulnerabilities with the ESP32 which allows an attacker to compromise the cryptographic library on the ESP32, MbedTLS. It’s important to note that an adversary will need physical access to the ESP32 module as it’s been compromised using a voltage-glitching attack. While this doesn’t impact hobbyists, it is a an attack on the hardware module (you can not roll out new software to patch it). If you have an ESP32 module in the field, it is potentially vulnerable to this type of attack, given an attacker’s resources and time. It looks like Espressif is following this report. They tweeted after ESP32 was pwned a couple of months ago: “We have upgraded the hardware; stay tuned for ESP32v3 with improved security and performance!”. We are unsure if this impacts the ESP8266 or the upcoming ESP32-S2 module.

Adafruit joins the Zephyr Project

The Zephyr Project is a scalable real-time operating system (RTOS) supporting multiple hardware architectures, optimized for resource constrained devices, and built with safety and security in mind, and we’re thrilled to announced we’ve joined the project. - Adafruit

Mozilla is building a “Web of Things”

Mozilla is building an “open platform for monitoring and controlling devices over the web”.

The idea of the Web of Things is to create a decentralized Internet of Things by giving things URLs on the web to make them linkable and discoverable, and defining a standard data model and APIs to make them interoperable.

Read more on Mozilla IoT…

Amazon’s long-term plan for Alexa

An interview with Rohit Prasad, Alexa’s head scientist, revealed details about where Amazon wants to head with their powerful voice assistant. - TechnologyReview

Hackable Smart Watch powered by Espruino

Bangle.js is a hackable, open-source smartwatch that can be easily customized. It’s currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter and may fill the space on our wrists from Pebble’s acquisition by Fitbit. The bangle packs more of a punch than a pebble with a nRF52832, 64kB RAM, heart rate monitor, accelerometer, magnetometer and a 350mAh battery. - Kickstarter

Best Buy discontinues Insignia IoT Products

Insignia, Best Buy’s generic hardware brand, has shut down every product which replies on their app (including a freezer). Each time this happens, we think about how many products in our lives rely on “other peoples servers”. Do you have a contingency plan for the IoT devices in your life? - Hackaday

Recognizing AI Snake Oil

AI has been intertwined with IoT (AIOT). But, “Much of what’s being sold as ‘AI’ today is snake oil — it does not and cannot work.”. This paper addresses the important questions of “Why is this happening? How can we recognize flawed AI claims and push back?” - Princeton

Analyzing NB-IoT and LoRaWAN Sensor Battery Life

Low power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies like NB-IoT and LoRaWAN are perfect for your projects requiring small packets, long battery life, and long distances. But how long will the batteries in your IoT project really last? - Semtech Developer Journal

Adafruit IoT Updates

Promotion: 1 Year of Adafruit IO Plus Free with $250 Adafruit Purchase

We’re running a special promotion! As of November 20th, 2019 5:30pm, if you place an order of $250 or more at Adafruit, you’ll receive a 1 year subscription to Adafruit IO+. You’ll receive a minimal yet elegant Adafruit IO+ Subscription Card! This card comes with a code on the back and when typed into your Adafruit IO account, will activate a full year of Adafruit IO+ service for all the IoT projects you can dream up.

Promotion: Google AIY Voice Kit for Black Girls CODE

For a limited time, whenever you buy a Google AIY Voice Full Kit the regular price of $59.95 here, on this page, Google will automatically donate one to Black Girls CODE. Black Girls CODE goal is to empower young women of color ages 7-17 to embrace the current tech marketplace as builders + creators. Check out the bundle on Adafruit’s website.

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.

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!