First up, an update from Justin:
We’ve made some more backend changes to how the AIO Keys are generated and maintained. If you run into any authentication or strange AIO Key issues please let us know as soon as possible in the IO forum or Issues Tracker.
Most of the changes were security enhancements, but we’re laying the groundwork for more features specifically related to the AIO Keys, including added administration functionality.
My favorite Adafruit IO project this week was the Cloud-Connected ESP8266 Power Meter:
Controlling the electrical consumption in your home is one of the most important thing you can do, both because of environmental concerns & to reduce the electricity bill at the end of the month. There are countless of electrical power meters out there, but in this guide, I’ll show you how to build your own, and to use the ESP8266 feather board to measure how much power a single device is using. Note that this guide is about measuring power for DC (Direct Current) devices only.
Here, we are going to do something different: we are going to measure the power used by a device, and then display it right on top of the ESP8266 board, user the featherwing OLED add-on board. This way, you’ll be able to build your own power meter based on the ESP8266, that is completely independent from any external components. As an additional function, we’ll also send the data on Adafruit IO so it can be monitored online.
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
