IoT Projects

Internet of Skull: An Internet Status Monitor

Maker Emily Velasco is known for her unique projects and the Internet of Skull is no different: “I live in a neighborhood with an internet provider of so-so quality. When the service works, it works well, but it goes down more often than it seems like it should for the $75 a month I have to pay for it.” This project monitors Emily’s home network status and displays it using an RGB LED for visual feedback. The project is mounted inside a fake skull, giving it a unique, biological, look. -MLE-Online

Text to update this RGB LED Matrix

Send text messages that magically scroll across a RGB LED matrix in bright colors. Update the sign from anywhere, or give the control to your employees or family members, since there’s no coding or computer needed to update your sign. -Adafruit Learning System

CAN Bus Sniffing with ESP32

The CAN bus, accessible through your car’s OBD-II port, is a channel holding real-time data from your car. EQMod developed an ESP32-powered dongle that plugs into an OBD-II port and can be used to sniff CAN bus data. Data is displayed on a self-hosted webpage. -HackADay

Antique (Internet) Radio

Craig Lindley built a vintage-style radio that plays music from an internet radio station. The enclosure is made from 1/8” baltic birch and the radio itself is powered by an ESP32 WROOM. -HackADay

IoT News and More!

How Raspberry Pis Were Used to Protect NASA Telescope Data

The Register explains how scientists used the power of Raspberry Pis saved data from the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope. - Adafruit Blog

Ethernet is still going strong after 50 years

Ethernet has become the standard wired local area network around the world, and it is widely used in businesses and homes. It was honored this year as an IEEE Milestone, a half-century after it was born. - IEEE Spectrum

IoT Projects

PeggyBoard: An Interactive Climbing Wall

The PeggyBoard is “a Raspberry Pi project developed to be paired with your home “woody”/climbing wall. It features an easy-to-use web app that anyone on your network can open up and begin setting a custom route that will then light up the respective holds on your wall. These routes can also be saved so they can be revisited later.” - GitHub

A Loud Phone Ringer for the Elderly

Giovanni Aggiustatutto built a custom base for an elderly friend. The cordless landline phone’s base contains a loud ringer and flashing lights to alert the friend of an incoming call. - HackADay

HydroCleaner: River Cleaning Robot

A low-cost, ML-powered, robot that attempts to capture trash in small waterways. - HackADay.io

Using Meshtastic and OwnTracks to Kick A Google Location Habit

Jonathan Bennet was searching for an alternative way to share location data with their wife and business travel. They combine Meshtastic, a LoRa-based mesh network, and OwnTracks, a GPS location tracker, to create a private (self-hosted) location-sharing service. - HackADay

Screen Time Monitoring with Adafruit IO

Using an HLK-LD2410B human detection sensor and Adafruit IO to monitor the amount of time an engineer spends staring at their computer screen. - Hackster.io

LoRaWAN Birdhouse

A birdhouse with a weight scale inside to detect a bird. The birdhouse is powered by solar energy and can transmit the scale’s data via LoRaWAN to the Internet. - HackADay.io

IoT News and More!

Millions of UK Smart Meters will Brick

Millions of smart meters in the UK will become “bricked” as 2G and 3G mobile networks are turned off across the country. - The Register

IoT Projects

Bright Block: A Bike Gizmo for Urban Science

Kelsey’s bike light does a bit more than we’d expect from a standard bike light. It’s also a climate monitor “built to capture and characterize several aspects of biking in the city”. As the cyclist rides, it measures and maps environmental data around the city, including temperature, humidity, and air quality. - HackADay

LED Matrix Sports Scoreboard

If you’ve ever wanted to see all of your sports stats in one spot, this project is for you. You can build a large RGB LED matrix display to monitor your favorite s teams. A Matrix Portal S3 running CircuitPython requests data from the ESPN API to show your teams’ gameplay data alongside team logos that are resized and gamma-corrected to look crisp and bright on the matrices. - Adafruit Learning System

A Cheap but Precise Weather Station

JP Gleyzes built a long-range weather station for their RC flying club. “These (wind) conditions are locally changing quite fast and the weather forecast is not accurate enough for our hobby”. The weather station’s feed can be accessed via this link. - HackADay

Hot Tub Monitoring Machine

Stephen’s hot tub monitoring system uses commercial sensors to track their hot tub’s water quality measurements. The system uses an ESP32 to read the sensors and send out the data to Home Assistant. They’ve included a “calibration mode” that verifies their sensor reads against a hot tub with a known good buffer solution. - HackADay

IoT News and More!

Adafruit.io and WipperSnapper Updates

This past month, a lot has been going on with our Adafruit.io platform and WipperSnapper firmware – Support for UART components, device auto-configuration, and new sensors. - Adafruit Blog

Philips Hue will force users to upload their data to Hue Cloud

Philips Hue is a fantastic IoT product that the author of this newsletter has written software for. Soon, they will soon require you to sign into their application and share data with the Hue Cloud. Home Assistant’s article covers the privacy implications of this change, and as of October 2nd, they have already reverted some of these changes. - Home Assistant

Sony energy harvesting module generates power from electromagnetic wave noise

Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation (SSS) has developed an energy harvesting module that uses electromagnetic wave noise energy to power IoT devices. - CNX Software Blog

Your Car is a Privacy Nightmare

Jenny List writes about the transition of the personal vehicle from a machine to a software product. - CNX Software Blog

IoT Projects

Smart Plant Monitor with E-Ink Display

This plant monitor is neat because it “takes advantage of the ESP32-S3’s touchpad feature which has all the circuitry needed to monitor (soil) capacitance”. - HackADay.io

BirdNETPi - a real-time acoustic bird classification system

BirdNET is an audio analyzer built around TensorFlow Lite. It runs on a Raspberry Pi and “is able to recognize bird sounds from a USB microphone or sound card in real-time and share its data with the rest of the world” - GitHub

OpenMower - DIY Smart Mowing Robot

The OpenMower project alleges that inexpensive off-the-shelf robotic mowers aren’t great! They “drive in a random direction until they hit the border of the lawn, rotate for a randomized duration, and repeat”. Instead of this basic operation, OpenMower is improving its mowers through open-source, community-built, software. - GitHub

Album Art for Turntables

Paul Cutler built an RGB matrix that can display the album art of whatever is spinning on a turntable. From a website, he picks the album he’s listening to, a script converts the image into a bitmap, and the bitmap is sent over MQTT to an RGB matrix that’s sitting on his desk. - prcutler on Mastodon

Open-Source Heat Pump Controller

ThermTerm is an open-source heat pump controller and home automation terminal, built on ESP32, by Danilo Campos. - Adafruit Blog

IoT News and More!

Adafruit.io and WipperSnapper Updates

This past August, a lot has been going on with our Adafruit.io platform and WipperSnapper firmware. It’s hard to keep track of everything! To address this, we, the Adafruit IO team, will publish bi-monthly (or monthly if we do not have enough news) “WipperSnapper Updates Wednesday” posts on the Adafruit Blog. This will help you stay informed about all the activities on this platform. - Adafruit Blog

Results from the 2023 Blues IoT Survey

Blues Wireless conducted a developer survey for users of their IoT platform and shared their insights. - Blues.io

Smart Garbage Trucks

Lewin Day writes about an Australian city testing smart garbage trucks to identify street-level maintenance issues. - HackaDay

IoT Projects

The Ultimate Guide to Waterproofing your Electronics Project

The Cave Pearl Project has been deploying undersea data loggers since 2013 and knows a thing or two about waterproofing electronics. This post is a summary of the techniques used by the project in waterproofing their data loggers. - The Cave Pearl Project

Smart Powermeter

J.G.Aguado’s power meter “provides real-time data on your energy consumption, giving you a quick overview of your grid’s status whenever you need it.” The power meter features a 2.9” e-paper display and is powered by an ESP32-S2 (which can be used with your favorite diy-smart-home application). - HackADay

Keep the Internet Online with a DIY Automatic Transfer Switch

Geekabit’s friend was “looking for an automated transfer switch (ATS) so his PC and modem do not lose power when the circuit breaker trips.” Their DIY project switches the power over from a wall outlet to an uninterruptible power supply, keeping a PC and modem online. - geekabit

Ikea Vindriktning: Hacked for IoT!

The Ikea Vindriktning is a small and affordable air quality monitor that measures PM2.5 particulates for an AQI reading. The light bar on the front changes from green, yellow or red depending on the reading. It’s a fun little device, but it would be great to make it Internet of Things capable and this guide shows you how to do just that. - Adafruit Learning System

Jellyfish Umbrella with Easy WiFi Control

Make a jellyfish umbrella with animated lights, with no coding required. It looks beautiful in the evening! Make your jellyfish dance and flow with lights, tentacles, and iridescence. This is an intermediate project that gives you advanced results. The software is simple to load and use. Hundreds of animations and color combinations are available right through your fingertips, using any web browser or the free WLED app on your phone. - Adafruit Learning System

OMOTE: DIY Universal Remote

Frustrated by Logitech’s discontinuation of their Harmony Smart Remote, Max K. built their own universal smart remote. Focused on ergonomic design and graphics, the OMOTE features a capacitive 2.8” touchscreen and infrared, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. - HackaDay.io

IoT News and More!

The White House Debuts IoT Cybersecurity Labels

The White House unveiled its plan for a U.S. Cyber Trust Mark that will certify that the IoT device marked with the label has met a set of security criteria developed to protect consumers’ networks and device data. The U.S. Cyber Trust Mark will be a voluntary program administered by the Federal Communications Commission, and the label should start appearing on devices in 2024. - Stacy on IoT

Adafruit IO WipperSnapper Now Supports 20 Boards!

We’re thrilled to announce that WipperSnapper, our no-code IoT firmware, now offers support for twenty (20!) development boards, and there are more in the pipeline! WipperSnapper firmware is portable, as it can seamlessly integrate with boards from any manufacturer, not limited to Adafruit alone. You can use WipperSnapper on a range of platforms and microcontrollers, including ESP32, ESP32-S2, ESP32-S3, ESP32-C3, ESP8266, RP2040, and ATMEL SAMD+ WiFi Co-Processor. - Adafruit Blog