MQTT Updates and Our Growing Community. This is the #AdafruitIO Weekly Update #IoTuesday
It has been a couple weeks since we did a proper IO update, and there has been a lot of progress going on behind the scenes. First off, we are getting really close to hitting 10k (9,750) online feeds. This is our favorite metric as it means that there are almost 10k feeds actively sending and receiving data. We have had really steady growth, which has allowed us to learn, fix, and scale the system accordingly.
Last week Todd posted a couple nice articles to the AIO blog that talked about our recent MQTT changes. If you aren’t following the AIO blog, be sure to check it out here.
In Adafruit IO, I created two feeds, called ledone and ledtwo, and added them to a group called leds.
I then created a dashboard with two toggle switches, and tied them to the feeds (one to each, obviously) using the default ON and OFF button text.
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.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
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.