Category Archives: Internet of Things


Elecrow launches Crowbits: Electronic Blocks for STEM Education

With the grand success of CROWPI2, an all-in-one portable Raspberry Pi Laptop development platform, Elecrow has now come up with Crowbits: easy-to-use electronic building blocks for young inventors. Crowbits include more than 80 modules that can be easily snapped through built-in magnets to create projects. It also incorporates a graphical programming software -Letsocde, where users can simply drag and drop blocks to develop applications.

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ESP32 BLE/WiFi development board

We have added a new IoT product to our Tindie store. It is a rapid prototyping and development board for the powerful ESP32 WiFi/BLE module. It is targeted toward rapid development of a wide variety of IoT applications, supporting both WiFi and Bluetooth connectivities. The development board breaks out all the module’s pins to 0.1″ headers and provides a CP2102 USB-TTL serial adapter on board for easy programming. The board also features on-board power supply regulator and an integrated LiPo Battery Charger. ESP-WROOM-32 is a powerful, generic Wi-Fi+BT+BLE MCU module that targets a wide variety of applications, ranging from low-power sensor

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ESP8266 smart lamp

In her new Instructables, BECKY STERN illustrates how to add a voice control feature  to an vintage lamp using ESP8266 and Amazon Echo/Alexa. To control the AC portion of the circuit, I’m using a Power Relay FeatherWing– just interrupt the hot lamp wire and plug the stripped ends into the Normally Open and Common screw terminals. Remember, if you don’t know AC, find someone who does to supervise. My lamp had a switch along the cord, so I just removed it and used the wire that the switch had been controlling.

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Another ESP8266 internet clock using LED matrix panels

Internet has made it easy for computers to synchronize their clocks to an accurate clock value generated by a remote server. We discussed earlier how to make ESP8266-based internet clocks that utilizes National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) NTS service to retrieve accurate time information and display it on a 4-digit seven segment LED display and on a TFT display. This article from Ayzenberg describes a similar ESP8266-based internet clock that displays time on a large 16×72 LED matrix panel. It also features APIs for displaying messages or setting the display brightness.

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Water quality monitor for your pool

Are you tired of checking the pH level and chlorine concentration of water in your swimming pool everyday? This Pool Buddy project from Johan Brichau might be helpful for you to monitor the water quality automatically. It will also upload the data online continuously so that you can easily access it from anywhere. It uses the Ph and ORP kits by atlas-scientific.com for sensing the water quality and the Particle Photon for collecting the sensor data and sending them to an online database over the WiFi connection. A small solar panel is also mounted to keep the device running autonomously. The Photon firmware boots the device every

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