Building Internet of Things projects with Arduino can be quite complicated: first, you need to find the right hardware & libraries for your project. Then, you need to find the right online service to send your data to. Finally, if you want to have some live graphical visualisation, you need to find or build an online dashboard for your project.
In this guide, we are going to build an Internet of Things dashboard using the Adafruit IO service. We will see that using Adafruit IO makes the process so much easier, as it will allow us to easily send data to the cloud from an Arduino board, and also easily building an Internet of Things dashboard just by dragging & dropping some elements.
As an example, we will connect several sensors to an Arduino Uno board, which will use the CC3000 WiFi chip to connect to the web. Then, we will send the measurement data to Adafruit IO & visualise it there in real-time, from anywhere in the world. Let’s dive in!
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
