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  • Feb 1, 2024 • @brentru

    Adafruit IoT Monthly: $5 BLE Occupancy Sensor, Ikea Sensors, and more!

    IoT Projects

    Building an occupancy sensor with a $5 ESP32 and a serverless DB

    occupancy

    Matt didn’t think he would “design a full end-to-end software solution to collect occupancy data across a college campus” but he ended up doing just that. This project collects BLE beacons from nearby devices, as a count for occupancy, and sends it back to a time series database for analysis. - Matthew Science Blog

    No-Code IKEA Vindriktning Air Quality Sensor Hack with Adafruit IO

    ikea

    The IKEA Vindriktning is an inexpensive air-quality monitor that’s readily available online (from Ikea’s website) or at a retail IKEA store. This guide will show you how to connect your Vindriktning to the Internet to log air quality data over time, without any programming required. - Adafruit Learning System

    An ESP32-based internet radio streamer

    radio

    Dimitris has taken an unused ESP32 board and fashioned an I2S streaming internet radio. - Adafruit Blog

    Make a Weather Clock with the Feather Huzzah ESP8266

    weather

    Instructables user Elaine Gao made this beautiful weather clock using a Feather Huzzah ESP8266 and Adafruit IO! - Instructables

    IoT News and More!

    Ikea debuts three affordable smart home sensors

    ikea2

    Each sensor costs less than $10 and can be used to detect open doors, windows, motion or water leaks. - The Verge

    Breaking Free from DRM: The Story of Hacking My Air Purifier

    drm

    An investigation into the Xiaomi 4 Pro’s DRM’d Air Purifier - Unethical

  • Jan 9, 2024 • @brentru

    Adafruit IoT Monthly: The 2023 Recap Issue!

    Editor’s Note - Happy Holidays!

    newyear

    Hi, readers (almost 6 thousand of you!). This is the first IoT Monthly newsletter of 2024. We typically write one newsletter issue per year recapping our favorite things from the previous year. This is the recap issue, with a small twist! Instead of just listing off what I enjoyed posting about in 2023, I’ve asked my recent colleague, Tyeth, to also share their favorite projects from 2023.

    If you’re a new reader of this newsletter – welcome! I’m Brent. I’m an engineer at Adafruit who works on all kinds of things, including writing the IoT Monthly. This newsletter was previously known as the Adafruit.io newsletter and only contained news and projects about our Adafruit.io IoT Platform. In 2019, we expanded this newsletter to the broader topic of the Internet of Things. Adafruit’s other newsletters are distributed frequently. But, this newsletter is distributed only once a month, giving us enough time to gather information from around the internet for you. I’d also like to extend a “hug report” (Adafruit parlance for “thank you”) to our copyeditor, Anne, for her behind-the-scenes editing work on these newsletters for the past 3 years.

    I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I enjoyed putting it together, and I hope you have a wonderful new year, wherever you are in the world.

    • Brent

    Request for Feedback/Articles: If you have feedback or want to submit your project to this newsletter, email iotnews@adafruit.com.

    IoT Projects, in Recap

    Tide and Time

    tidetime

    Tyeth says: “I’m strangely infatuated with this tide clock (maybe because we have one of the largest tidal ranges here in Bristol, England). The internal mechanisms are surprisingly simple and elegant, with a nicely described build log and great finished product, this one is on my make list for next Christmas.” - HackADay.io

    Hot Tub Monitoring Machine

    hottub

    Tyeth says: “Having had to save the family from chemical mishaps in the past, this hot-tub pH+ORP monitoring project is a must for those who like a carefree plunge.” - HackADay.com

    Hyepaper

    paper

    Tyeth says: “I enjoyed growing up with newspapers there to fill you in on the world’s events, and now it’s nice to have ChatGPT provide an AI summarised equivalent in this lovely E-Ink display fed with all your favorite websites.” - HackADay.io

    Star Fragment Lamp

    star

    Inspired by Star Fragments from video games such as Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, this fully 3D printed star-shaped lamp uses a QT Py ESP32-S2 and NeoPixel LEDs to turn on when the sun rises and off when it sets. – Adafruit Learning System

    Guide to Waterproofing Electronics

    rust

    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

    News, in Recap

    I’ve enjoyed reading and learning about the following news articles in 2023…

  • Dec 20, 2023 • @brent

    WipperSnapper Updates Wednesday: A New Component Picker, Beta 74, and More Sensors!

    ws-update-banner

    This past month, a lot has been going on with our Adafruit.io platform and WipperSnapper firmware – let’s take a look:

    🪄 A Better Component Picker

    With 81+ components (at the time of writing) supported by Adafruit IO WipperSnapper, we needed a better way to filter through components and parts. As a result of the growing list of components, we’ve redesigned and updated the Adafruit IO component picker. The new component picker performs much better than before, with numerous optimizations under the hood. But by far the biggest addition is search! Knock yourself out searching for various keywords, like:

    • component names: aht20, servo, buzzer, button, etc
    • sensor types: light, temperature, pressure, humidity, etc
    • interface: i2c, uart, ds18x20, etc
    • vendor: Adafruit, ASAIR, Infineon, Bosch, etc

    We’ve also added product and documentation links to every component. The documentation links will often lead to one of our high-quality Learn Guides, terrific! And for folks browsing for components to buy, the product links are a handy shortcut to the Adafruit Shop or wherever the component is sold. If you’d like to see a video of the new component picker in action, you can watch Loren walking through it on a recent episode of Show & Tell! Read more…

    🆕 Latest Version of WipperSnapper: Adafruit.io WipperSnapper 1.0.0 Beta 74

    Adafruit WipperSnapper Firmware 1.0.0 beta 74 has been released on GitHub. This is the latest version of WipperSnapper and a stable release. Read the release notes here…

    🚢 “Works with WipperSnapper” - New Sensors for Beta 74

     WipperSnapper Beta 74 launched with support for 6 new sensors:

    • IKEA VINDRIKTNING AQI Sensor
    • LTR329 Sensor
    • LTR303 Sensors
    • LTR390 Sensor
    • HTU21D/DF
    • TU31D Sensor
  • Dec 12, 2023 • @brubell

    Adafruit.io WipperSnapper 1.0.0 Beta 74 Released!

    Adafruit WipperSnapper Firmware 1.0.0 beta 74 has been released on GitHub. This is the latest version of WipperSnapper and a stable release.

    Install WipperSnapper 1.0.0 Beta 74

    Follow this learning system guide to learn how to install Adafruit IO WipperSnapper.

    Upgrade a device already running WipperSnapper

    Locate the device you’d like to upgrade on io.adafruit.com/devices. Then, click “Update”.

    Major Changes

    🐛 Bug Fixes

    🆕 New Components

    🛠️ Tooling

    Full Changelog: https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Wippersnapper_Arduino/compare/1.0.0-alpha.75…1.0.0-beta.74

  • Dec 5, 2023 • @lorennorman

    WipperSnapper Component Magic

    update-banner

    Happy December from the Adafruit IO team!

    Today I’m bringing news of not one but two big improvements to WipperSnapper: our no-code IoT platform interface.

    More Components, Better Picker

    As I write this, WipperSnapper now supports 82 unique components! From servos to NeoPixels, I2C to UART, analog, digital, PWM… how can we keep it all organized???

    Behold, our redesigned component picker:

    component-picker-redesign

    Faster, Searchable, and More Detail

    This picker update performs much better than before, with numerous optimizations under the hood. But by far the biggest addition is search! Knock yourself out searching for various keywords, like:

    • component names: aht20, servo, buzzer, button, etc
    • sensor types: light, temperature, pressure, humidity, etc
    • interface: i2c, uart, ds18x20, etc
    • even I2C addresses: 0x77, or just 77
    • vendor: Adafruit, ASAIR, Infineon, Bosch, etc

    We’ve also add product and documentation links to every component. The documentation links will often a lead to one of our high quality Learn Guides, terrific! And for folks browsing for components to buy, the product links are a handy shortcut to the Adafruit Shop or wherever the component is sold.

    If you’d like to see a video of the new component picker in action, you can see me walking through it on a recent episode of Show & Tell!

    Working in the Sun

    At Adafruit, we’re dedicated to open source. All of our WipperSnapper-compatible components are created and maintained in the Wippersnapper_Components open-source JSON repository. We’re proud to be able to work in the open. In fact, the work for this update was iterated openly on this Pull Request!

    If there’s a component you’d like to see supported by WipperSnapper, head over and check the Request Issues page to see if it’s already in the works. If not, feel free to open an issue requesting your favorite component! And, if you’re handy with code, you could even get involved and contribute to the project. After all, the microcontroller code that drives WipperSnapper is open-source as well.

    Magic Configuration

    Not to be outdone, we’ve also made some updates on the board side of things. With WipperSnapper up to 21 compatible boards (and counting!), and thousands of user boards active right now (and growing!), we knew it was time to make it easier to configure them.

    Export, Import, Magic

    The next time you take a look at one of your devices you might notice a new button at the top of the screen labeled “Auto-Config”:

    auto-config-button

    Upon clicking it, you’ll be presented with various auto-configuration options:

    auto-config-menu

    Quick overview of each:

    Export: Got a device configuration you’d like to recreate later? This will let you save a file that does just that. Maybe you want to delete and recreate this device? Or perhaps a friend wants to clone a setup of yours? Use export to get a file that can be imported later, instantly re-configuring the device exactly as you have it, now.

    Import: The opposite of export! This is where you take export files you’ve created, or received from a friend. Uploading a valid file here will provide an interface for rapidly creating a fully-configured device. Each component can be selected/deselected for import, individually. Any possible import errors will also be shown.

    Magic: Finally, the best part: MAGIC! For supported boards, Magic Config will jump straight to the import interface mentioned above with every built-in component on this board configured for import. That’s right, even boards with truly insane numbers of components onboard are ready to go in a one click (I’m looking at you, Funhouse!)

    To see a video of the Funhouse getting configured (almost instantly!), check out this clip from Show & Tell. Here’s an image of the Funhouse’s Magic Config import screen: so many components!

    funhouse-magic

    More Open Source

    Of course, we also built the board additions in the open, here’s some quick links for the curious:

    As always, if you have any suggestions or bugs to report about these new features, please let us know in the forums.