First up, an important update from Justin:

On Thursday, April 21st we will be deploying Version 2 of our API. This version is quite different from our existing API V1.

IMPORTANT: Your code or sketches will need to be updated if you are using the REST API.

From now until Thursday, you will want to update your code or sketches to change ‘/api/…’ to ‘/api/v1/’ so that you continue using v1 of the API until you are ready to upgrade to the latest version.

Here are some of the highlights (not including bug fixes):

NEW

• New permission system that will allow for sharing read and write access to your feeds, groups, & dashboards with other users.
• New AWS inspired HTTP request signing to help avoid exposing the user’s AIO key over insecure connections.
• Dashboards, blocks, & triggers will be able to be modified via the REST API.

CHANGES

• Username will be a required component of the URL.
• You will no longer be able to access feeds & groups via numeric ID. Feed key & group keys will be used as the unique identifier in API v2.
• Feeds will be able to be added to many groups, and the feed’s data will be namespaced to the group the data is pushed to. You will also be able to access all of the feed’s data by accessing the feed directly.

My favorite Adafruit IO project this week was Task: The Ambient Planner:

I believe smartphones and social media lead us to feel overwhelmed and overloaded by the amount of detailed information we consume each day. Add in the fact that some jobs expect almost 24/7 reachability, and our once organized planners begin to look a lot like daunting novels.

Enter Task: The Ambient Planner. By connecting an online to-do list (Todoist, https://todoist.com/) to Task, we can reduce some of the informational clutter we get assaulted with each day.

Now, when you add or complete an item on your list, Task will light up or turn off an LED in turn. In doing so, we can simply glance at an ambient display to see how much we have on our plates, rather than get overwhelmed with written or typed text.

Required for this project are the latest version of Arduino IDE (https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software) and subscriptions to the following three services: Adafruit IO (https://io.adafruit.com/), If This Then That (IFTTT; https://ifttt.com), and the online task management program, Todoist (https://todoist.com/).

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. You can also visit our comprehensive tutorial located on the Adafruit Learning System.

We also have a blog/changelog specifically for Adafruit IO to keep you updated with the latest changes.

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