Monitor PiCam and Temperature on a PiTFT. This is the #AdafruitIO Weekly Update #IoTuesday
First off, here are the stats for the past week:
* 10,506 users
* 8,208 online feeds (22,681 feeds total)
* ~50 inserts per second via MQTT
* ~5 inserts per second via REST API
My favorite Adafruit IO guide this week is from Jeremy Blythe who shows us how to monitor PiCam and Temperature data on a Raspberry Pi with an Adafruit PiTFT and Adafruit IO. Unlike a lot of our examples that specifically use the build in Adafruit IO Dashboards to display data, Jeremy shows us how Adafruit IO can be used alongside other technologies to make prototyping easier.
Did you know you can save and retreive images from adafruit.io? You can! That means you can have a Raspberry Pi with a camera upload images to the service, along with other sensor data. Then, another Pi on the other side of the world can view the images and data, to create a custom remote-viewing tracker. It’s like your very own Nest but you can add any sort of data over lay you like.
This project uses two Raspberry PIs – a sender and a receiver. The sender has a Raspberry Pi Camera and an MCP9808 temperature sensor to publish data to adafruit.io. The receiver, a dashboard somewhere else in the world, subscribes to this data feed and displays it.
This dashboard Raspberry Pi has a PiTFT and displays the image whenever it’s sent to the feed (every 5 minutes), the current temperature is overlaid on the image using pygame. The final cherry on the cake here is that if you tap the screen you flip to the graph view. This takes the data from the feed using the io-client-python data method, pulls out the last 24 hours and uses matplotlib to draw a graph of temp/time. Of course, you can see the feeds in the adafruit.io online dashboard too!
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 make it easy for people to get started using Arduino or ESP8266 we have starter packs with just about everything you may want to connect to the internet, with known-working WiFi modules! ESP8266 Huzzah Kit
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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, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, 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.
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Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: CircuitPython 2025 Wraps, Focus on Using Python, Open Source and More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
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.