Adafruit IoT Monthly: Internet in Antarctica, Measuring Heart Rate with WiFi, and more!

IoT Projects Streaming Audio over Bluetooth Low Energy from a Raspberry Pi Thanks to recent advancements in BlueZ (the Linux Bluetooth stack), AK Experiments decided to try streaming audio over Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) using a Raspberry Pi. - AK Experiments Engineering for Slow Internet in Antarctica While working in Antarctica, brr “had access to the Internet only through an extremely limited series of satellite links provided by the United States Antarctic Program”. Modern websites often load up to 20 MB of Javascript, which makes connecting to the Internet in Antarctica a challenge. Brr’s exploration into engineering a faster, slow, internet is detailed in their blog post. - brr Universal Sensors for Home Assistant Two totally different options for a building sensor to communicate with Home Assistant. - GitHub IoT News and More! WiFi signals can measure heart rate Researchers at UC Santa Cruz developed Pulse-Fi, technology that uses WiFi signals to measure a person’s heart rate. Pulse-Fi appears to be highly accurate, with clinical-grade accuracy. This system is unique because it does not require any wearable devices. - UC Santa Cruz u-blox Sells for $1.3bn to Private Equity Firm After exiting the cellular space this year, connectivity module manufacturer u-blox has been sold to Advent for $1.3bn. - RCRWirelessNews Dual-Antenna Boards by Unexpected Maker We got these unique new boards from Unexpected Maker in the shop last month. This is a very niche product to stock, hence why I’m including it in this newsletter. What makes them unique is these boards have both an antenna AND an u.FL connector for an external antenna, on the same board. You can switch which antenna to use via the RF switch on the fly from your code. These are perfect if you want to test different antenna variations while in the prototyping phase of a project, before you commit to a final design. - Adafruit Blog KittenTTS is a state-of-the-art TTS model under 25MB Kitten TTS is a new open-source realistic text-to-speech model with just 15 million parameters, designed for lightweight deployment and high-quality voice synthesis. Under 25MB and CPU optimization means its perfect for electronics projects. - Adafruit Blog