Jack Preston's Smart Bag Uses an Adafruit Feather, Adafruit IO to Track Environmental Conditions
After falling out with Amazon Web Services, Preston turned to Adafruit IO — and quickly put together a smart environment-monitoring bag.
Edinburgh-based maker Jack Preston has shown off a backpack with a difference: This "smart bag" tracks temperature, humidity, and pressure as its owner walks around the streets of Scotland.
"I did an Internet of Things and stuck it in my backpack thanks mostly to the absurd usability of Adafruit hardware and Adafruit IO," Preston writes on Twitter of their latest project, "which I picked up after I threw AWS [Amazon Web Services] IoT into the sea in a fit of murderous rage."
Based on an Espressif ESP8266 microcontroller in a Feather form factor, the smart bag takes advantage of the board's built-in battery circuitry for on-the-go data logging and communicates with a MS8607 break-out board over a solder-free STEMMA QT connection to track temperature, humidity, and pressure.
The data captured from the system's environmental sensors is then streamed over the ESP8266's Wi-Fi connection to Adafruit IO, the company's Internet of Things platform, where it can be viewed using a web interface suitable for smartphone use.
"Things I like: STEMMA/Qwiic enabled I2C breakout boards, Adafruit Feathers, the ESP8266," Preston writes. "Things I don't like: AWS Amplify, seamlessly jumping to an available Wi-Fi network from a configured list with embedded libraries, trying to remove JST connectors gently."
Preston has written about the project in a Twitter thread, but has not yet published source code or schematics.