Adafruit IOT Monthly (July 2018) #AdafruitIO #IoT
Hi all,
We’re starting to build a new nEw NEW…sletter about the Internet of Things and updates to our service, Adafruit IO.
Before we move it to a newsletter format, we’re testing it out as a long blog post. It’ll transition to include news/projects build around Adafruit IO, and stories, news, and projects revolving around the Internet of Things.
Adafruit IO News: Features and Updates
New Feature: Feed Sharing
You’ve always been able to make your feeds completely public or completely private. Private feeds are hidden from the outside world, no other user can see them and no one browsing Adafruit IO can stumble across them. Public feeds are available as a read-only data source to anyone in the world. Until now, though, there hasn’t been a way to receive data from other Adafruit IO users in your feeds and no way to share your data with just one person.
Feed sharing introduces the ability to share a particular feed with a particular user as a read-only or read-write feed. This means you can keep a feed “private” as far as the whole world is concerned, but allow another Adafruit IO account to send data to it and read data from it.
Read more about the Feed Sharing Feature here…
Client Updates: Python and Arduino
We’ve released updates to our two most popular Adafruit IO Client Libraries: Adafruit IO Arduino and IO-Python.
On the Python side, we’ve added support for sending location values (lat/lon/elevation) to a feed, added secure connections for the MQTT client, more robust error handling, new documentation, ability to subscribe to time-topics, and brand new examples. Some preliminary usage examples for Adafruit IO and Adafruit Blinka (Circuit Python on Raspberry Pi) have also been added.
The Arduino library has also been updated for ESP32 compatibility (Feather Huzzah32 and more!), new documentation, more usage examples, and dedicated time-topic subscriptions.
Read more about library updates here…
Powered by Adafruit IO: Projects from the Community
Each month, we select our favorite projects from around the internet, using Adafruit IO. Here are some of our favorites:
Heart-Locket IoT Presenters Necklace
When Lorraine Underwood presented at the Raspberry Pi Fields event this past month, she made a heart-locket necklace which changed color when you tweet, snapchat, email, or text her. The necklace was made using a Feather Huzzah8266, NeoPixel ring, and a LiPo battery pack.
Laundry Monitor
While the chore of doing laundry has evolved from drying on a clothesline to using a machine and laundry-pods, the process still feels like it could be improved by adding more technology. [Zach Wendt and Jeremy S. Cook] agreed with this and built a laundry monitoring circuit which uses a vibration sensor to detect when the laundry cycle starts and stops.
WiFi Smart Scale
Working out this summer and need to record your weight? IgorF2 built a smart scale (instead of buying one) which connects with Adafruit IO to log his weight over the course of the summer.
Are you working on a project which uses Adafruit IO and want to show it off? Tweet (#adafruitio), Join our Discord channel (http://adafru.it/discord), or join the SHOW-AND-TELL every Wednesday night at 7:30pm ET on Google+ Hangouts.
New Adafruit Learning System Guides
Have you heard about making, cosplay and electronics, but don’t know where to start? Visit the Adafruit Learning System for over 1500 tutorials for electronics projects, ideas and techniques! We’ve selected two, internet-of-things-based, guides from the learning system:
Using Crickit and Adafruit IO Together
Crickit – That’s our Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Feather ecosystem that lets you #MakeRobotFriend using CircuitPython, MakeCode (coming soon), or Arduino. The best part? You can quickly and easily build robotics and interactive projects which connect to Adafruit IO by plugging an Adafruit Feather Huzzah8266 into a Crickit FeatherWing. Dave Astels wrote a guide designed to get you up and running with the Crickit FeatherWing
Welcome to Adafruit IO
“Want to connect your project to the Internet? Start with this guide designed to get you up and running with Adafruit IO using supported hardware and libraries!”
Enjoyed skimming the Adafruit IOT Monthly? Leave us a comment below!
Here at Adafruit, we sell all of these amazing components, but we couldn’t find a good way to interact with them over the internet. There are certainly a lot of great services out there for datalogging, or communicating with your microcontroller over the web, but these services are either too complicated to get started, or they aren’t particularly fun to use. So, we decided to experiment with our own system, and that is how Adafruit IO got started.
To start, please visit https://io.adafruit.com, and take a look around.
Want to get started quickly? Get up and running with the Welcome to Adafruit IO Guide on the Adafruit Learning System.
Experiencing issues or problems? Join us in the forum or on Discord in the adafruit-io channel with questions, comments, or suggestions.
We also have a blog/changelog specifically for Adafruit IO to keep you updated with the latest changes to Adafruit IO.
To make it easy for people to get started using Arduino or ESP8266 we have a starter pack with just about everything you may want to connect to the internet, with known-working WiFi modules!
ESP8266 Huzzah Kit