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Editor’s Note – Happy Holidays!
Hello readers,
I’m Brent. I’m an engineer! I work for Adafruit on all kinds of things, including writing the newsletter you are currently reading. The IOT Monthly is a newsletter different from what you may be used to reading. This newsletter is distributed only once per month, giving us enough time to gather information from around the internet for you. This isn’t an industry newsletter, nor a newsletter covering every IoT project or news item. Instead, it’s a carefully curated collection of projects and news that we find genuinely interesting.
As a tradition, I typically start the new year with a newsletter that recaps our favorite things from the previous year. This lets me reflect on the past year and share with you some of the interesting projects and news that I’ve come across. I’d also like to extend a “hug report” (Adafruit’s parlance for “thank you”) to our copyeditor, Anne, for her behind-the-scenes editing work on these newsletters for the past 4 years.
If you have feedback for improving this newsletter, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to make it better. Also, if you want to submit your project directly to this newsletter, please email us at iotnews @ adafruit.com (remove the spaces!).
I hope you had a wonderful and restful holiday season,
Brent
2024 IoT Projects, in Recap
IKEA Vindriktning Air Quality Sensor Hacks
The IKEA Vindriktning is an inexpensive air-quality monitor that’s readily available online (from Ikea’s website) or at a retail IKEA store. We published two guides on hacking these devices to add additional sensors and connect them to the internet for logging measurements. – Adafruit Learning System
Industrial Network Playground
This is a smorgasbord of industrial network components, including PLCs, connected to a network. The playground helps a beginner learn and experiment with industrial control systems, without physically being in a factory. – HackADay.io
Adorable CO2 Gauge
An adorable internet-connected sensor that is unobtrusive and passively displays CO2 information. I really like these gauges and would like to see more thought put into projects like this! While internet-connected, the gauge does not require a mobile website or app. The information it presents can be interpreted by a child. But they also log data to the Internet for observing long-term trends and alerting. – kuenzi.dev
AI Image Description Camera
2024 was a year filled to the brim with AI announcements. This is a great project from Adafruit’s Liz Clark to illustrate the capabilities of OpenAI’s image description model. Images taken with the Adafruit MEMENTO camera are sent to OpenAI “to request a description of the image with various prompts”. The OpenAI response is visible on the camera’s display. – Adafruit Learning System
News, in Recap
I’ve enjoyed reading and learning about the following news articles in 2024…
- The Open Home Foundation, comprised of popular open-source projects like Home Assistant, ESPHome, Zigpy, Piper, Improv Wi-Fi, and Wyoming, was founded to work against “surveillance capitalism, the risk of a buyout, and open-source projects becoming abandonware”. – Open Home Foundation
- Tennessee Tech developed a way to power sensors in a field by transmitting electric power through the soil. – IEEE Spectrum
- A solar storm in May 2024 had impacts that were felt by millions of IoT devices. Memfault dives into their databases to find out how many of their monitored devices were impacted. – Memfault Blog
- Consumer Report’s Stacey Higginbotham wrote about why manufacturers should embrace vulnerability disclosure programs for IoT devices. – Consumer Reports
- WiLo is a new hybrid protocol that combines WiFi and LoRa. The result is a new approach for sending data (larger packet sizes than LoRa) over long distances, perfect for industrial IoT or agriculture IoT applications. – [IEEE Spectrum]
