Starting today, November 15th, 2022, all new Power-Ups in IO for the weather service will be using Apple’s WeatherKit weather service.

Dark Sky has been deprecated and will be shut down on March 31st, 2023. All existing weather integrations will continue to work until that time.

We recommend that prior to that deadline you migrate your existing weather integrations to the new WeatherKit weather service.

The steps to create the integration are the same, and we will automatically default to the new service for you.

If you need help migrating your client code, Apple has a Transitioning from Dark Sky section that provides field mapping data from Dark Sky to WeatherKit.

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

IoT Projects

WiFi Jellyfish Lanterns with WLED

Create your own luminescent jellyfish out of iridescent vinyl and NeoPixel LEDs. Easily add endless light patterns with the free, and easy-to-use WLED software, with no coding required. You can even make multiple jellyfish and sync them up over your WiFi network. - Adafruit Learning System

Using Plumbing Valves as Heavy Duty Analog Inputs

Alistair Aitchison of Playful Technology shows how to repurpose plumbing valves for use as inexpensive, heavy-duty, analog inputs. - Arduino

ESP32 Thin Client

A DIY thin client with a tiny keyboard and a 320×240px touchscreen display. - HackaDay

No-Code IoT Soil Sensor

A soil stake that monitors plant vitals using Adafruit’s No-Code WipperSnapper firmware. - Adafruit Learning System

Pothole Detection with Sony Spresense Camera

A project that uses the Sony Spresense module to detect and log the GPS location of potholes. - Hackster

IoT News and More!

Matter 1.0 is finally finalized — so what’s next?

Matter, the latest smart home standard, opened for certification last month. Jennifer Tuohy writes about “what’s next” for this standard. - TheVerge

Home Assistant’s SkyConnect Dongle Offers Plug-and-Play Zigbee, Matter, and Soon Thread Support

SkyConnect, a $29.99 dongle designed to add Zigbee, Matter, and Thread support to a server running Home Assistant OS. - Hackster

Everything we know about the White House’s IoT security labeling effort

The White House is working towards a “national cybersecurity certification and labeling authority” for all electronics, including IoT devices. - arstechnica

IoT Projects

No-Code IoT CO2 “Canary In a Coalmine”

Much like the canaries that were kept in coal mines to detect gases, this build uses a CO2 sensor to detect indoor air quality. When the air quality is poor, the bird will drop, until you open your windows and bring it back to life! - Adafruit Learning System

AQI Funnies

The “AQI Funnies” project by extrasleepy combines air quality readings from sensors with comic strips. The comic strip’s content changes depending on the day’s air quality index. - ExtraSleepy

FloWat - Sustainably Powered Water Flow Analyzer

A “sustainable way to analyze flow rates in irrigation pipes for agriculturists without needing to worry about changing the battery every day”. An F50 Hydroelectric Generator charges and powers the FloWat’s sensor node. Data about the water flow (in mL and Water flow per revolution) is logged to the internet over WiFi. - FloWat

Tiny LED WiFi Companion Cube

This tiny LED cube scrolls messages from the internet. - Adafruit Learning System

WiFi Mailbox Notifier

Inconsistent US Postal Service delivery times led Kattni towards building a notifier “that tells you when your mailbox has been opened.” - Adafruit Learning System

Water Detector with Home Assistant

Andres Leon’s indoor air conditioner’s condensation pipe clogged and caused a small flood. In lieu of purchasing an off-the-shelf solution, they “decided to spend an inordinate amount of time, money, and effort into creating a water alarm device.” If a flood is detected, their device emits a high-pitched alarm and sends an email and text message. The 2500mAh LiPO battery runs for about 2439 hours. - GitHub

Affordable Solar-Powered Weather Station

The fourth revision of Debasish Dutta’s weather station is designed to be placed in remote areas which lack data-driven weather predictions. The “Solar Powered WiFi Weather Station V4.0” is solar-powered and transmits data using a LoRa module to a base receiver. - HackADay.io

IoT News and More!

Community-led Flood Monitoring with NYC FloodNet and FieldKit

The FloodNet cooperative is a group of researchers and NYC agencies that seek to reduce the risk of flooding in NYC. FloodNet has collaborated with FieldKit and created an online portal to allow NYC residents to visualize flood data, submit feedback, and assess their flood risk. - FieldKit

Building Dynamic Grafana Dashboards

Golioth published a blog post about making Grafana IoT dashboards more dynamic. - Golioth Blog

The Adafruit IO team just released an update for Adafruit IO and the No-Code IoT Firmware, WipperSnapper. This update brings the ability to control the position of a servo motor from Adafruit IO, without writing a line of code. Servos may be used in any IoT projects where you need to physically display a value or to open a door/window/lock.

Combine Adafruit IO Actions with Servos for Rule-based IoT Projects

We also enabled control of a servo motor from an Adafruit IO Action. For example, the Action below tells a servo to write a pulse width of 2500uS if the temperature sensor (also connected to a WipperSnapper device) is greater than 70 degrees Celsius. The servo could be attached to a door, and open it if the temperature is too high.

How we implemented servos in Adafruit IO

The Adafruit Shop stocks many different types of servos that can rotate 180 degrees (90 degrees in each direction). While most (standard, non-continuous) servo motors generally adhere to “default” servo pulse widths provided by the Arduino library (1ms to 2ms), it’s possible that the defaults may not give you a full 180 degrees of motion. Instead of setting the angle of the servo, Adafruit IO’s servo support includes a “Generic Servo Component” that lets you set the minimum and maximum pulse width for your servo, in uS. Further - if your servo uses a non-standard frequency (anything other than 50Hz), it can be changed from here.

Read the Quickstart: Adafruit IO WipperSnapper guide to get started today for free »>

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

IoT Projects

Two Way Telegraph with Analog Feedback Servos

A fun way to communicate quietly (and wirelessly) within the same household or long distance to let someone know you’re thinking of them. These modern telegraphs use a combination of analog feedback servos and capacitive touch to create a two-way communication system. The emoji-clad dial is inspired by a ship’s mast. - Adafruit Learning System

cloudSmoker - BBQ Temperature Monitor

This is the last newsletter of summer, so we’ll include one last BBQ project. The cloudSmoker is a DIY temperature monitor for BBQ grills that can display time graphs of two temperature probes (pit and internal meat temperatures) and push notification alerts to a smartphone for when the meat is ready. -GitHub

E-Paper Price Tag Grid

E-Paper price tags are becoming ubiquitous at big-box stores in Europe (with slow adoption in the United States). After the tags were reverse-engineered, Aaron purchased a couple hundred of the tags and built them into a grid. Each display is controlled over ZigBee from a host PC. - YouTube

Using AWS IoT with the ESP8266

Brian took a deep dive to get AWS IoT working with his ESP8266 development board. This guide “should be treated like a recipe” and includes reproducible steps for using this board with the AWS IoT platform. - NetNinja

Modular Control System for a Garden Pond

Poseidon is a modular system for a garden pond. Leveraging a TICK stack (Telegraf, Influxdb, Chronograf, and Kapacitor), the system can control a fish feeder, water tap, the pond controller, and monitor the overall water quality. There’s also a web app to interact with the pond. - GitHub

MiniHelmetTracker - NFL Standings Tracker

As we proceed into American Football season in the States, Simon Schoar published their real-time NFL standings table robot. The MiniHelmetTracker “retrieves standings data - close to real-time - via WiFi and sorts mini helmets by the league, conference, division, and playoffs.” -schoar

CircuitPython on ESP32

The ESP32 is a great and very popular processor used on lots of development boards. However, its lack of native USB has kept it from getting a CircuitPython build… Until now! A new web workflow feature being added to CircuitPython 8 has brought the ESP32 back to the scene. This guide gets you started with CircuitPython on the ESP32. - Adafruit Learning System

IoT News and More!

The Engineer’s Guide to Matter

Ovyl has an excellent blog post up that cuts through the marketing details about the Matter IoT protocol and provides only the technical details. - ovyl

Azure Embedded Wireless Framework

Microsoft published information about their Azure Embedded Wireless Framework to GitHub. This is “a framework for writing applications and controlling wireless network adapters (cellular, WiFi, …) while abstracting a driver interface for hardware vendors to plug-in modules with self-developed drivers.” We’re all for abstracting driver interfaces! -Adafruit Blog