ICYMI – Adafruit IoT Monthly: Physical Event Notifiers, Particle deprecates Particle Mesh and More! #Adafruit #IoT @Adafruit @AdafruitIO
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IoT Projects
All-in-One MQTT Home Automation Remote
serverframework built a WiFi “MQTT remote” with an ESP8266. Pressing a button will trigger 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
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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!
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