Engineering & Technology

We’ve got the New nEw NEW for you right here

This week we debuted 2 new products!

Visit www.adafruit.com/new for more info.

Want to get new products info beamed straight into your inbox? New nEw NEWs From Adafruit is an email newsletter sent once a week to subscribers only. It features new products, special offers, exciting original content, and more. Sign-up for the Adafruit weekly Newsletter here: https://www.adafruit.com/newsletter

New nEw NEWs From Adafruit is an email newsletter sent out once a week to subscribers only. It features new products, special offers, exciting original content, and more. Sign-up NOW for the Adafruit weekly Newsletter here: https://www.adafruit.com/newsletter

This past weekend some Adafruit folks were lucky enough to attend a talk from Dr. Jane Rigby, who serves as Senior Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. Dr. Rigby’s address served as the keynote speech in the inaugural Tinsley Workshop series, hosted by the Yale Department of Astronomy.

Dr. Rigby went deep on some of the discoveries made by the JWST team and then took questions from the audience. One audience member asked whether or not the JWST is being used to search for alien life. Dr. Rigby pointed out that the JWST is not specifically designed to search for alien life. However, NASA is currently developing the tantalizingly named Habitable Worlds Observatory. Here’s more from NASA:

Currently referred to as the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), this is a concept for a mission that would search for and characterize habitable planets beyond our solar system. Building upon studies conducted for two earlier mission concepts called the Large Ultraviolet Optical Infrared Surveyor (LUVOIR) and Habitable Exoplanets Observatory (HabEx), HWO would be designed specifically to identify potentially habitable planets around other stars, closely examining their atmospheres to determine if life could possibly exist.

The mission’s main objective would be to identify and directly image at least 25 potentially habitable worlds. It would then use spectroscopy to search for chemical “biosignatures” in these planets’ atmospheres, including gasses such as oxygen and methane which could serve as critical evidence for life. The observatory would introduce new capabilities to study the universe with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution, giving us important new insights into the evolution of cosmic structures, including how galaxies form and develop over time.

See more!

In the LED Neon Selfie Spot guide Erin St Blaine will show you how to build your own custom selfie spot out of LED Neon. It’s easy to assemble, it’s mobile, and it’s also easy to take apart and re-configure, when you decide you’re ready for a change of scenery.

There’s no coding required. Just choose the colors you want, lay them out, and plug them in to get a magical glowing wall of selfie goodness.

Check out the full guide!

Hello Kitty was first drawn for Sanrio by Yuko Shimizu in 1974, followed by Setsuko Yonekubo then illustrator Yuko Yamaguchi who is responsible for the Hello Kitty we’re all familiar with today. Read more about Hello Kitty’s history from CNN:

Sales of Hello Kitty products flourished in Japan between the 1980s and mid-1990s. Much of the company’s earlier merchandise was aimed at young girls, including school supplies and personal care items like toothbrushes. But, even then, illustrator Yamaguchi knew the character would need to evolve and grow with her fans.

Celebrate 50 years of Hello Kitty with Sanrio

salimbenbouz shared this neat project on instructables, thingiverse, and Github! If you’re into 3D printing and Pi projects, they’ve combined the right amount of nostalgia in this miniature PC.

Inspired by the retro machines I grew up with during the 90s and early 00s, I decided to design and build a working tiny miniature PC to bring a little of that nostalgia to my desk. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the entire process of building one, sharing detailed steps and tips to help you recreate this project.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

ICYMI (In case you missed it) – the IoT Monthly Newsletter from AdafruitDaily.com went out this morning!

If you missed it, subscribe now! – You’ll get one newsletter each month.

The next newsletter goes out in a month and being subscribed is the best way to keep up with all the Internet of Things. No spam, no selling lists, leave any time. Over 6,300+ subscribers worldwide!

Here’s a peek at the November 2024 issue…

IoT Projects IoT Fog Machine with Motion Sensor

Step up your fall decor game this year with a motion-sensitive fog machine. This guide will show you how to hack a standard-issue Halloween-store fog machine to add lights and reactivity, and control your lights and fog from your smartphone — from anywhere in the world! – Adafruit Learning System

An Internet-Connected TI-84 with ChatGPT

Remember using TI-BASIC to create programs to calculate the side of a triangle, instead of memorizing the Pythagorean theorem? Well, it’s 2024 and this TI-84 has been modified to connect to the internet. It can connect to OpenAI’s ChatGPT client and can be used to chat with the AI. – HackADay

Use Apple HomeKit Devices with itsaSNAP and Adafruit IO

Have you ever looked at your various Apple HomeKit devices and thought “If only I could monitor and control my devices in Adafruit IO”? Now you can with the help of the itsaSNAP app. You can use Apple Shortcuts with itsaSNAP to integrate your Apple HomeKit devices with Adafruit IO. You can go even further and use CircuitPython to display and log your device’s data using Adafruit IO feeds.- Adafruit Learning System

An Interactive and Free Bluetooth GATT Course on YouTube

HackADay blogged about this excellent Bluetooth GATT (Generic Attribute) series on Cornell Professor V. Hunter Adams’ YouTube channel. You’ll learn about the protocol, set up a Bluetooth GATT server on a Raspberry Pi Pico W, and use a smartphone app to send data to the server. – HackADay

IoT News and More! Cisco Is Abandoning the LoRaWAN Space With No Lifeboat For IoT Customers

Cisco announced it’s abandoning the Cisco LoRaWAN product lines in 2025 and the LoRaWAN space. Further, Cisco has announced that they are not providing migration plans. Companies who relied on Cisco’s reputation in the networking space to build their solutions are now left to find a new LoRaWAN network and hardware provider. – The Register

New Protocol: WiLo – WiFi Meets LoRa

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

Aerogarden Shuts Down Its Servers

AeroGarden, which produces the “Smart Planters” sold by Scotts Miracle-Gro, is going out of business. The future of these desktop smart gardens is now uncertain, as they require a mobile app and a server to function. – ArsTechnica

IKEA Rolls Out Matter Support

Matter is the smart home industry’s new standard that allows smart products to connect and work together seamlessly, no matter which brand they’re from. IKEA is rolling out Matter support in their smart home hub, the DIRIGERA. The new firmware turns it into a “Matter Bridge” and is already available for download. – IKEA

Public WiFi in London Gets Hacked

Adafruit is located in New York City where there is now public WiFi in the subway stations. The same is true across the pond in London, except their public WiFi was recently hacked. The hacker was able to change the login message to a message about terror attacks. An internal investigation found that the hack came from “inside”, a breached admin account. This is a good reminder to consider what data you send when connected to a public WiFi network. – BBC

image from doctr_sbaitso on reddit

doctr_sbaitso shared this awesome e-ink daily flipping Calvin and Hobbes frame on reddit!

A raspberry pi 4B, waveshare e-ink display and HAT driver. the python interface/drivers provided with the e-ink display write a bmp-format image out to the display, and it’s pretty ‘dumb’ (no scaling/interpolation) so the BMP needs to be exactly 800×480.

So I have some bash using imagemagick to handle the logic of incrementing a counter to pick the next daily strip (they’re sorted as entries in a textfile by date of print), figure out aspect ratio (daily strip or sunday strip), convert to a BMP, then resize it to 800×480 with the correct vertical or horizontal padding, and then write it out to the e-ink display; and of course, using cron to have it execute at 4am each morning.

hope that helps! pretty straightforward to do, and it’s a great project for anyone that enjoys tinkering!

Here is a straightforward list of products used and cost breakdown:

• raspberry pi 4B was $60
• waveshare 7.5″ e-ink display + hat driver was $66
• got a iUniker raspberry pi 4 case to house it all for $12
• got a short 90 degree usb-c to usb-c dongle for easier charging access, was $8
• photoframe from the local michael’s was $10 I think
• had a 32GB microsd card lying around, but thos can be had pretty cheap these days.

See more!

See our selection of E Ink screens and accessories!

The MagTag will get you up and running with an E Ink project in no time. Head over to the Adafruit Learning System and learn more

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

What do you think of when you think of a hacker? Today hackers have taken on international status as government-funded agents who can change the course of history. We might imagine a shadowy team in some droll office performing the 21st Century version of foreign interventions. That wasn’t always the case.

Forty years ago, hackers were thought of a nerdy solo acts. You might think about a particularly geeky Matthew Broderick accidentally pushing the world toward global thermonuclear war while trying to impress Ally Sheedy in WarGames. Hackers for quite some time were seen as basement dwelling, Doritos munching outsiders ready to break the law through nerdy means just to get a little status.

In 1995 that all changed. The movie Hackers dramatized in a very Hollywood sort of way what had already happened: rave culture, electronic and synth-based music, the early wild-west internet, conspiracy theories (back when they were fun), Blade Runner aesthetics, and a very cyberpunk view on politics had converged into a bleeding-edge cool. This vibe transformed the zeitgeist so much that by the turn of the century everybody was fluent in the visual language that first surfaced in the mainstream with Hackers.

Here at Adafruit, we love Hackers. One of the most fun Raspberry Pi projects we’ve seen comes from the ever-reliable HackersCurator. A re-creation of Nikon’s laptop, powered by Raspberry Pi. Here’s more:

We recreated a fully functioning reproduction of Lord Nikon’s laptop from the iconic cult classic film Hackers from 1995. Here is how we did it, and you can too! In Hackers, Lord Nikon A.K.A. Paul Cook, played by Laurence Mason sports an iconic laptop and startup sequence from the film. We wanted one that actually works. We captured the entire process on Twitch and have compiled the build into this video.

See project:

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

1. The Lost Tribes of RadioShack: Tinkerers Search for New Spiritual Home
2. The multi-function USB Dongle, based on an ESP32-S3
3. Why Does USB Keep Changing?
4. A “hello world” program in machine code on MS-DOS
5. Using Retrom to Manage Your Retro Game Library on Raspberry Pi
6. MSU engineers create bendable, self-heating and healing concrete
7. NOAA’s 2024-2025 U.S. Winter Outlook
8. ESP32 dev board Red Flags
9. Happy World Teachers’ Day 2024
10. LED Masquerade Masks #ElectronicHalloween

Check out the Feather RP2040 DVI Video Synth guide in the adafruit learn system!

In this project, you’ll use a Feather RP2040 with DVI Output to build a fun and funky video synth. The Feather runs Arduino code written with the Adafruit Fork of the PicoDVI library. All you’ll need is USB power and an HDMI monitor to start visually vibing with shapes, colors and static.

Check out the full guide! If you’re looking for even more video synth examples with the Feather RP2040 DVI, be sure to check out our friend TodBot’s video synth experiments. He’s done some great examples with lots of color and MIDI.

While I’m not motivated by counting down how many months I could have left, I certainly know a few folks who would proudly recreate and display rabbitcreek’s LifeTime tracker on Instructables:

The lifeTime provides you with an electronic version of this coda. It is an animated grid of tiny Neopixels stacked up into the months you will live over the course of 90 years. It requires that you input the owners birthday. On regular intervals the tablets open to reveal an animated display of how much time you have left. Otherwise it sleeps and provides you with background illumination that varies with the time of day and inspiration to think about life instead of death

Read more

The Adafruit Feather ecosystem is so rich with hardware diversity, we wanted to share them, one each day. Today is the Adafruit 0.56″ 4-Digit 7-Segment Display w/ FeatherWing – Blue!

One segment? No way dude! 7-Segments for life!

This is the Blue Adafruit 0.56″ 4-Digit 7-Segment Display w/ FeatherWing Combo Pack! We also have these combo packs in Green, Red, White, and Yellow!

7-Segment Matrices like these are ‘multiplexed’ – so to control all the seven-segment LEDs you need 14 pins. That’s a lot of pins, and there are driver chips like the MAX7219 that can control a matrix for you but there’s a lot of wiring to set up and they take up a ton of space. Here at Adafruit we feel your pain! After all, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could control a matrix without tons of wiring? That’s where these LED Matrix FeatherWings come in!

The 7-segment FeatherWing backpack makes it really easy to add a 4-digit numeric display with decimal points and even ‘second colon dots’ for making a clock.

The LEDs themselves do not connect to the Feather. Instead, a matrix driver chip (HT16K33) does the multiplexing for you. The Feather simply sends i2c commands to the chip to tell it what LEDs to light up and it is handled for you. This takes a lot of the work and pin-requirements off the Feather. Since it uses only I2C for control, it works with any Feather and can share the I2C pins for other sensors or displays.

The product kit comes with:

• A fully tested and assembled Adafruit 4-Digit 7-Segment LED Matrix Display FeatherWing
• Ultra-bright 4-digit 0.56″ tall blue seven-segment display
• Two 16-pin headers

USE

The Adafruit 7-Segment LED FeatherWings Guide provides details and use examples.

Guides:

• 7 Segment Display Internet Clock
• CircuitPython BLE Heart Rate Zone Trainer Display

Video:

The Python for Microcontrollers Newsletter is the place for the latest news involving Python on hardware (microcontrollers AND single board computers like Raspberry Pi).

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El0y0 shares this deign for a Skeleton head with movable jaw

download the files on: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6795476

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord

Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit

Shop for parts to build your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting

3D Printing Projects Playlist:

3D Hangout Show Playlist:

Layer by Layer CAD Tutorials Playlist:

Timelapse Tuesday Playlist:

Connect with Noe and Pedro on Social Media:

Noe’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/ecken

Pedro’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/videopixil

Video from the National Park Service nps.gov

November is Native American Heritage Month, also known as American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month. All month long we will be sharing blog posts to celebrate. You can check throughout the month for new posts paying tribute to the experience, history, traditions and contributions of American Indians and Alaska Natives. We hope you will join us this month as we learn about the diverse cultures that make up these groups.

You can see more resources here:

National Congress of American Indians

NativeAmericanHeritageMonth.Gov

Smithsonian Institute

Follow along on the Adafruit blog

Jack_N shares:

As a child, I had a colorful string of lights with Christmas bells on them. Unfortunately I never found it again. So here you can print it yourself. One insert is required per bell and has to be put together as shown in the pictures. Works with most fairy lights. Merry Christmas.

download the files on: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6764802

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord

Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit

Shop for parts to build your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting

3D Printing Projects Playlist:

3D Hangout Show Playlist:

Layer by Layer CAD Tutorials Playlist:

Timelapse Tuesday Playlist:

Connect with Noe and Pedro on Social Media:

Noe’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/ecken

Pedro’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/videopixil

Shared by Aleas on Thingiverse:

Crown created from models of some bones. Model parts connection together by using wire and super glue.

Download the files and learn more

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

5iStanley_1493513 shares:

Pumpkin key board switch fidget toy designed for Cherry MX Switches.

download the files on: https://www.printables.com/model/1053734-pumpkin-fidget-cherry-mx-switch

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord

Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit

Shop for parts to build your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting

3D Printing Projects Playlist:

3D Hangout Show Playlist:

Layer by Layer CAD Tutorials Playlist:

Timelapse Tuesday Playlist:

Connect with Noe and Pedro on Social Media:

Noe’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/ecken

Pedro’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/videopixil

Aries and Leo compatibility brings passion, energy, and excitement. Discover how these fire signs balance each other in love, friendship, and life.

Discover the adventurous Sagittarius man, known for his love of freedom, optimism, and charm. Learn his traits, relationship style, and what makes him unique.