IoT Projects

PyPortal Quarantine Clock

Do you know what day it is? Perhaps you’re finding yourself losing track of time and your routine is suffering. The PyPortal Quarantine Clock has got you covered! It only displays the essential “stay-at-home” information - the current day and a rough estimate of the time. - Adafruit

Smart Video Intercom System

This Raspberry Pi-powered hardware notifies you when guests arrive and lets you talk to them on your phone through internet calls. - Hackster

NerfOrNothing: Instrumenting a NERF Football

Timothy Kanarsky and his team “cut a Nerf football in half, stuck a WiFi-enabled microcontroller and some accelerometers inside, and wrote some inertial-navigation code to track throw distance and spin rate”. - HackaDay.io

Simple Home Alarm System

Need an alarm system for your home? Build one using only two components: an ESP32 and a 433MHz RF receiver. If you want to adapt this project to a different sensor - there’s (lots of different sensor types)[https://www.ebay.de/itm/193291348372] and devices operating on the 433MHz frequency available on the internet. - GitHub

Add Coverage to your IoT Project with a Satellite Modem

Who’s got the best coverage map? Anyone using the Iridium satellite constellation, that’s who. How does whole Earth coverage sound? This guide shows you how to setup and use the Rock Seven RockBLOCK 9603 Iridium Satellite Modem. This hardware is tied to service that is also provided by Rock Seven. - Adafruit

Reverse Engineering a Ceiling Fan Remote

Reverse engineering a ceiling fan remote for home automation. - HackaDay

Wearable Continuous Temperature Monitor

Hands-free temperature monitoring means you can sleep soundly. Data is sent to an Adafruit IO account for long-term storage and visualization. Use Adafruit IO Triggers to be notified by email when the temperature increases past a set threshold. -Adafruit

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

Apollo Pi Thermal Camera

OldTechNewSpec repurposed a vintage Apollo microwave detector from 1979 as a thermal camera. It’s powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero with an AMG8233 thermal camera breakout, displaying the temperature on a 1.3″ TFT display. - Instructables

IoT News and More!

Behind the scenes of fighting coronavirus using GPUs

Gamers are using their high-performance GPUs to participate in Folding@Home, helping to understand proteins interactions of SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. - HackaDay

Stay Smarter than Your Smart Speaker

Working at home on confidential projects? Your speaker may be spying on you. Kristina Panos outlines “the best practices of confidential work in earshot of these audio-triggered gadgets?”. - HackaDay

83 Billion IoT Connections by 2024

A new study from Juniper Research found that the total number of IoT connections will reach 83 billion by 2024, rising from 35 billion connections in 2020. - Juniper Research

Solid, a New Approach to the Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Solid is a new approach to decentralizing the Internet, led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. - Solid

Demand for Sharp’s Face Masks Crash Servers and Air Conditioners

Sharp’s online store server went down, taking smart gadgets including air conditioners with it. - The Verge

New ESP32 AI Development Board, ESP32-Korvo

ESP32-Korvo is Espressif’s new AI development board. Equipped with a multi-microphone array, it can achieve high performance, spoken-command recognition and far-field voice wake-up. - EspressIf

Are Insect Brains Better for Neural Computing than Human Brains?

We model existing neural networks based on human brains to replicate human intelligence. Tasks like navigation for driverless cars and drones have researchers wondering if they should focus on insect brains instead. - NetworkWorld

The Advantage of LPWAN Chirp Technology

Chirps are great for low power wide area networks (LPWAN) because they occupy a single dimension. Semtech’s Oliver Seller takes us through what chirps are and why they’re useful for LoRa-based signal modulation. - SemTech

Adafruit IO Stats and more!

Adafruit IO has 323,646 total users! Here are the interesting stats from the last 30 days:

• USERS ACTIVE (30 days): 13,553
• TOTAL FEEDS: 495,048
• FEEDS CREATED (last 30 days): 14,281
• There are about 4,200+ 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.

A note from the editor - We’ll make it together

Phil and Ladyada here, we usually do the newsletter each week, this week are diverting all our attention to efforts in NYC and awhile the world to help combat the COVID-19 outbreak. Thank you community for keeping us strong, and thank you Adafruit team for running the newsletter for now.

Adafruit was deemed an essential manufacturing, service and business in NYC by – Executive Order 202.6. We have a blog post with an overview and things are changing quick, stay tuned for updates on everywhere Adafruit is on social media - Read more.

We are Shipping a limited number of orders for health care professionals / urgent needs only. All other orders are being held for now.

Adafruit is a 100% woman-owned, loan-free, VC-free. profitable, USA Manufacturing company. Please see our about page and press page to read about us. Our founder and lead engineer is Limor Fried, a MIT Electrical Engineer.

We have paused some operations in NYC due to COVID-19, we are paying all team members, contractors, and more.

There are no layoffs for 130+ Adafruit team members. Adafruit was deemed an essential service to distribute/make some PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) such as face shields, and manufacturer electronics for essential life-saving/preserving equipment and development which is needed in New York and beyond.

Adafruit Industries located at 150 Varick Street, New York, NY 10013 by Executive Order 202.6, “Essential Business” by New York State: https://esd.ny.gov/guidance-executive-order-2026

Adafruit provides the following services:

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Essential health care operations including: Medical supplies and equipment manufacturers and providers

We are maintaining some, but not all, business operations to assist in providing these valuable services to combat the COVID-19 outbreak.

If you are working on COVID-19 related efforts, we are shipping.

IoT Projects

AvoRipe – Check your Avocado’s Ripeness

Eden Bar-Tov built a device to check an avocado’s ripeness twice a day. If an avocado is ripe (AvoRipe checks both color and softness), a push notification will be sent to your phone notifying you that the avocado is ready to eat. - Adafruit

Stay Informed: How to Pull your Own COVID-19 Data

Tom Nardi wrote a guide on hackaday for pulling and 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

Upcycled Cassette IoT Display

Martin Mander, aka Old Tech. New Spec, gives life to obsolete technologies, usually by sticking a computer in them and connecting them to the internet. In this example of the upcycler’s craft, he’s turned a cassette (an ancient, rubbish way of recording music) into an IoT notification reader. - Adafruit

Space Station Grow Box Replica

m1st3r_c is building a replica of the plant grow-box used on the Internal Space Station for the Natural History Museum of London. - Adafruit

Pushup Counter

Stay fit even if you have to stay inside! Use a proximity sensor to count your push-ups. - Hackster

Ethernet for CircuitPython with Wiznet5K

Wireless is wonderful, but sometimes you want the strong reliability of a wired connection. If your CircuitPython project is going to be part of a permanent installation, you’ll want to add ethernet networking to your project. - Adafruit Learning System

IoT News and More!

Are All Edge Devices “Servers”?

A discussion broke out on Twitter between leading experts in the field of servers, IoT, gateways and single-board computers over the future of “edge computing.” This post is meant to summarize what was talked about for a broader audience because it is relevant to how we, as an industry, think and talk about “The Edge.” - Adafruit

Eye on NPI - ESP32-S2

First off, we are kicking off “EYE on NPI” video series with the Espressif ESP32-S2 SoC. These chips come with a great core, lots of RAM, proven TLS+TCPIP stack, a complete development platform, and lots of code examples. If you’ve used the ESP8266 or ESP32 many elements will be familiar to you! The best new peripheral for this chip is the new USB OTG system. Yes finally native USB comes to ESP! - Adafruit

NEW VIDEO: What is Adafruit IO?

Build IOT projects with Adafruit IO! Control your projects over the internet and create a dashboard to visually see your sensor data - YouTube

Watchy, an ESP32-powered Open Source e-Ink Smartwatch

Squarofumi designed a beautiful open source smartwatch with Arduino and Python Support. This watch has a “200×200 E-ink display, WiFi + BLE (Powered by ESP32), BMA423 Accelerometer, 4 Buttons + Vibration Motor, DS3231 RTC for accurate time keeping, and a 2 Week Battery Life”. Schematics and code are available on GitHub. You can also purchase one for $55. - SquaroFumi

IoT Design Week - Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Ladyada and PT talked about Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence with Microchip Technology. - YouTube

Espressif ESP32-S2 Sample Boards Shipping

We’re seeing some ESP32-S2 samples appearing in the hands of more developers. We’re looking forward to TinyUSB, and then CircuitPython on this module. - TinyUSB

How Nordic Semiconductor Built ThingyWorld for Embedded World 2020

Nordic Semiconductor built an impressive asset tracking demo for their booth at the Embedded World 2020 conference. Their Thingy:9’s are distributed all over the world and tracked using AWS IoT core. - Nordic DevZone

Adafruit IO Stats and more!

Adafruit IO has 318,457 total users as of March 27, 2020! Here are the interesting stats from the last 30 days:

• USERS ACTIVE (30 days): 16,697
• TOTAL FEEDS: 482,240
• FEEDS CREATED (last 30 days): 21,104
• There are about 4,330+ 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.

IoT Projects

How I Made My Heating Smart without Damaging or Replacing Anything

Andy Bradford has been wanting to upgrade their home’s heating system for a some time – but their house is rented. Damaging the house would cause them to lose their security deposit, “so the whole system must do no damage, be made only of removable parts and be installed without modifying any of the existing infrastructure.” - AndyBradford.dev

Temper, a compact temperature sensor based on ESP8266 and SHT30

Temper is a compact, low power temperature (~30-40uA) sensor based on an ESP8266 and SHT30, with a large 13x7 pixel LED display. - GitHub

Adafruit CLUE-based Bike-Mountable Computer

The Adafruit Clue is “the bike-mountable commuter computer [Jose Castillo] has always dreamed of”. - @josecastillo

MicroPython-powered Lightbulb

MicroPython on an ESP8266-based smart-bulb. Instead of a interacting with the bulb using a proprietary app, @goatchurch is running a MQTT client on the ESP8266 and an MQTT broker on their computer. - @goatchurch on Twitter

BLE Cheerlights

Using an AirLift FeatherWing to get the current cheerlights color, then advertising the color over BLE to an ItsyBitsy nRF52840 and a Circuit Playground Bluefruit. CircuitPython code is available on GitHub . - @DavidGlaude

Control Home Appliances with Google Assistant and Adafruit IO

Techmirtz is controlling a 60W (not smart!) bulb using the Google Assistant voice-based command service. Adafruit IO, our free IoT service, has built-in integration with services like IFTTT. - Hackster.io

Building an ESP32-CAM Video Surveillance Robot

konsdor has designed and built a video surveillance robot, powered by the ESP32-CAM microcontroller board. The robot may be controlled by the operator over the internet, as the board has WiFi networking built-in. - Hackster.io

PyPortal Planter with Adafruit IO

Build a smart planter with an Adafruit PyPortal and CircuitPython. Monitor your plants vitals with an Adafruit STEMMA Soil Sensor and plot moisture and temperature data. Use Adafruit IO to create a visual dashboard with gauges of your plants water levels. - Adafruit Learning System

IoT Cloud Enabled Alarm Clock

Teaching a mid-2000’s clock some new tricks. MoritzDornseifer updated a Tivoli Audio radio clock to be set by the internet. They’ve redesigned the clock assembly and updated the hardware to run on a Arduino Nano 33 IoT. The alarm can be set via the snooze button and configured via the Arduino IoT Cloud Dashboard. - Hackster.io

How to Build a Hack-Proof Garage Door Opener

Pete Lewis built a new twist on an IoT garage door opener. He added an ATECC508A crypto co-processor board to provide end-to-end encryption when opening the door to his garage. - IEEE Spectrum

Internet-Connected Conference Badge

Codensolder built a CloudBadge conference badge with the PyBadge, an internet-connected conference badge which communicates with Adafruit IO over MQTT. While the PyBadge doesn’t have built-in WiFi, codensolder attached an AirLift WiFi FeatherWing to the PyBadge’s Feather headers to add WiFi, all coded in CircuitPython. - CloudBadge on GitHub

IoT News and More!

A CEO’s Experience During the nCoV Crisis

Espressif is a company with their main offices in China. The recent nCoV virus outbreak has affected them, but they’ve taken some precautionary measures, such as working from home and having multiple offices outside of China. Espressif’s CEO Teo Swee Ann published two articles about running the company during this outbreak. - Part I: Safety First, and Part II: On the Ground.

The Internet of Things is Sending Us Back to the Middle Ages

Joshua A.T. Fairfield discusses “the new digital serfdom” as we purchase more internet-enabled devices controlled by advertisers and large companies. - The Conversation, Pocket

Arduino IoT Cloud Gets a New Dashboard with Historical Data Import, Greater Customization, and More

Arduino’s IoT Cloud was updated with a shiny new dashboard which can import and display historical data from multiple devices. - Hackster.io

Raspberry Pi 4 v1.2 Fixes USP-C Power Delivery

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released a new revision of the Raspberry Pi 4 (identified by a c03112 model number) which fixes an identified issue with USB-C power delivery. - CNX-Software

The Things Industries launches a Global Join Server to push secure LoRaWAN provisioning practices

The Things Industries announced the launch of a Global Join Server which allows activation of any LoRa network, anywhere in the world, as long as it uses LoRa standard interfaces. This new ecosystem’s role is to “store root keys, generate session keys, and send them securely to the network and application servers”. This new model replaces the need for manufacturers to generate secure keys. - Things Industries via LinkedIn Pulse

Bluetera II, a full-stack dev board that uses protocol buffers

BlueTerra II is an open-source IoT development board which supports Google’s Protobuf and motion algorithms. This tiny board has “everything. From hardware to firmware to the software running on your mobile device or PC is strictly open-source”. They’re using a Madgwick-based motion fusion algorithm which is also open source, as opposed to other fusion algorithms supported by similar development boards. - CrowdSupply.

Adafruit IO Stats and more!

Adafruit IO has 311,441 total users! Here are the interesting stats from the last 30 days:

• USERS ACTIVE (30 days): 16,831
• TOTAL FEEDS: 458,270
• FEEDS CREATED (last 30 days): 21,985
• There are about 4,200+ 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.

adafruit.io has 308,729 total users, however! Here are the most recent stats from the last 30 days which is a pretty good picture!

• USERS ACTIVE (last 30 days): 16,656
• USERS ADDED (last 7 days): 1,989
• FEEDS: 458,270
• FEEDS CREATED (last 7 days): 5,535

In the last 30 days adafruit.io inserted over 789 million records. There are about 18 million background jobs per day and about 4,200+ MQTT connections active 24/7. IFTTT, Adafruit’s week in review: February 10 – February 16

• Service connections: +594, all-time 65,733
• Applet runs: +1,340,267, all-time 201,663,200
• Applets turned on: +1,627, all-time 151,161

IoT Projects

All-in-One MQTT Home Automation Remote

serverframework built a WiFi “MQTT remote” with an ESP8266. Pressing a button triggers a function to send a MQTT message to a Home Assistant listener. - serverframework blog

Kinetic Courier, Physical Event Notifier

Something happened? Ring a bell, wave a flag, light some lights! A physical notification platform for IoT events. - hackster.io

Alexa-controlled Adam Savage Pumpkin with IFTTT and Adafruit IO

minihannah built an Alexa-controlled pumpkin which uses a combination of Adafruit IO and IFTTT to trigger lights connected to an Adafruit Feather M0 WiFi. - adafruit blog

Internet Monster

A cute monster that repeats what the internet says. What could possibly go wrong! - instructables

PyPortal MQTT Sensor Node/Control Pad for Home Assistant

Richard Albritton wrote a guide about how to take IoT to the next level with this MQTT powered Super Sensor with an Adafruit PyPortal. - Adafruit Learning System

Physical Test Controller with TreeJS, Socket.io and CircuitPython

@makerschmitz is building a physical controller with a web interface. You can watch it in-action on Twitter.

IoT News and More!

Particle deprecates Particle Mesh, discontinuing Particle Xenon

Particle has announced today that they are discontinuing development of Particle Mesh, their OpenThread-based mesh networking solution, and will no longer be manufacturing their associated Xenon development board.

Particle states they ran into two barriers which kept them from delivering on the promise with Particle Mesh:

• Mesh networking, while a compelling technology, is extremely complex, and trying to make it “just work” with zero configuration for all customers in all environments just wasn’t feasible. As a result, the experience of Particle Mesh doesn’t live up to the standard that we set for ourselves with our other products.
• It turns out that, for most of our customers, 802.15.4 mesh networking seems to not have been the right technology in the first place; most customers would be better off using Bluetooth Low Energy (which we will continue to invest in) or a sub-GHz radio like LoRa (which can be added to Particle through third-party accessories).

See Particle’s full announcement and learn How to use Xenon with CircuitPython.

Testing CircuitPython on Teensy 4.0 – IoT made easy IoTeensy

CircuitPython has landed on the NXP iMX RT1062. We threw together a quick IoT project which uses the AirLift FeatherWing to fetch inspirational quotes from Adafruit’s quote service and displays them on an OLED FeatherWing. - Adafruit Blog

The World’s First LoRa SoC: STM32WL

STMicroelectronics announced the launch of the STM32L, the world’s first integrated LoRa System-on-a-Chip (SoC). This is the first silicon which integrates a microcontroller and a sub-GHz radio, previously two separate modules. - CNX Software

Arduino Portenta H7

Arduino released a new Pro line at CES 2020 with a new flagship board - the Portenta H7. This board contains a STM32H747, Murata 1DX dual WiFi 802.11b/g/n 65 Mbps and Bluetooth 5.1 BR/EDR/LE, Secure Element (NXP SE0502), and a GPU (Chrom-ART graphical hardware Accelerator).

Use-cases for this $99 board include “high-end industrial machinery, labratory equipement, computer vision”, and machine learning. - Arduino.cc

WeMos W600-PICO

WeMos released a new board for $2.10 USD plus shipping. The CPU is a Winner Micro W600 ARM Cortex-M3 WiSoC and the board is pre-loaded with MicroPython. - CNX Software

OTA Device Firmware Updates for NRF52 Processors

Mohammad Afaneh on NovelBits posts about updating the internal firmware on internet of things (IoT) devices via Bluetooth. - novelbits

Pocket-Sized ESP32 with 300uW Display

A pocket-sized ESP32 with a 300uW SHARP Memory LCD. - Hackaday.io

ESP-AHT-10

A minimalist ESP temperature sensor which you can plug into your USB port. Designed with KiCAD, the board files are open source and available on GitHub

Adafruit IoT Updates

All the Internet of Things Episode 6: Digi-Key IoT Studio

Adafruit and Digi-Key have teamed up to present All the Internet of Things – a six-episode series covering everything you could ever want to know about the Internet of Things.

We are very excited to release the final episode, which incorporates all the different subjects discussed in previous episodes, and shows off this incredible resource: Digi-Key IoT Studio.

Unlike most other IoT platforms, Digi-Key IoT Studio is code-less — all sensor interaction and storage is done automatically by the drag-and-drop IDE. You don’t need to install toolchains, code editors or compile any code on your computer! Digi-Key Studio runs in your web browser, handles all aspects of developing an internet of things project, and even compiles your code remotely.

Watch the full video or check out this guide to get started now.

Free Year of Adafruit IO+ with the GitHub Student Developer Pack

Great news for students! Adafruit is part of the GitHub Student Developer Pack!

If you are a student and have joined (details here), all you need to do is log in to your adafruit.com account, click Services, then GitHub, and click connect! The discounts and free adafruit.io plus are waiting for you, it’s that simple!

What is Adafruit IO?

Adafruit.io has over 16,000+ active users in the last 30 days and 930+ 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.