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IoT Projects

Evaluating Strategies for Climate Change in Arizona using Adafruit IO

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality is using Adafruit.io to evaluate “how applying mulch might reduce demand for irrigation”. The experiment demonstrated that a thin layer of mulch can lower soil temperatures by 12 degrees Fahrenheit, thus reducing soil-water evaporation. – Adafruit

Little Bluetooth Media Controller

@ketszim built a small one-off Bluetooth media controller to change the volume, play, or pause a movie. – Twitter

Tracking how long a freezer stays frozen with no power

This summer brought a few blackouts in the U.S. This experiment used a Raspberry Pi and temperature sensor to determine how long your food will stay frozen. – Woodgears

Designing a LoRaWAN Monitored Garden

czuvich on the Adafruit Forums demonstrates their Greenclay LoRaWAN Smart Garden project. It is able to monitor and manage an outdoor garden using LoRaWAN with an Arduino programmed microcontroller. It is a complete package which includes a dev kit, garden controller, and mobile app. – Adafruit Forums

Turn a Rotary Phone Receiver into a World-Wide Radio

This rotary phone maps the the rotary encoder to radiooooo, a website which lets you tune into any radio station int he world. The receiver was also modified to pipe audio from radiooooo to the rotary phone’s handset. – Hackster

Office Bell Ringer with Slack

Alex’s company rings a bell when they sign a customer, release a new feature, or if anything positive happens. But, remote employees are “left out of this experience”. He built a servo which physically rings a bell in the office via a slack command. – Alex Meub

IoT News and More!

Alphabet’s Loon Balloons Cover 11,000 sq. Km of Kenya with internet

Alphabet’s bet on sending balloons into near-space to connect people in internet-less blank spots has paid off. Their balloons have started lasting longer (from days to over half a year) and now cover 11,000 sq. km of Kenya with internet – Medium.

simdjson: Parsing gigabytes of JSON per second

JSON is everywhere on the internet. The SIMDJSON library uses SIMD instructions and micro-parallel algorithms to parse JSON 2.5x faster than anything else out there. – GitHub

Fitbit Study Suggests Wearables Might Be Able To Detect Covid-19 Before Symptoms Appear

Fitbit and similar wearables can track a wide array of vitals. A new study shows that subtle changes in things like breathing and heart rate could help with earlier detection. – FitBit

An Industrial IoT Platform Built on Battery-Free Sensors

Everactive has developed industrial sensors that run around the clock, require minimal maintenance, and can last over 20 years. The company created the sensors not by redesigning its batteries, but by eliminating them altogether. – MIT

You, Me, and IoT Two Microconference Accepted into 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference

The Linux Plumbers Conference (which just completed) accepted an IoT “microconference” into their conference tracks this year. We’ll hand-select a talk or two for the next issue of this newsletter. – Linux Plumbers Conference

Adafruit IO

Webhook Response Templates for Slack, Discord and More!

We’ve updated Adafruit IO’s webhooks in triggers (both scheduled and reactive) to allow custom response templating. This feature now allows webhooks to properly post to many more endpoints, such as Slack or Discord. We’ve included a couple of basic templates to build from.

Read more about all the changes here…

Adafruit IO Stats

Adafruit IO has 338,708 total users! Here are the interesting stats from the last 30 days:

• Total Feeds: 538,877 (and counting!).
• There are over 18,035 feeds online as of time of writing (July 30 2020).
• There are an average of 4,500+ MQTT connections active 24/7.

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