From the SparkFun blog:

Mort and Mary Present: BLE Soil Moisture Sensor with the Ultra-Low Power Works

It took a year to take a mess of wires, hardware and WiFi dependency and turn it into a new solution to monitor plants and the environment anywhere without a WiFi password. This is BLE-IOP.

The necessary circuitry from the Blue Gecko module like the antenna, radio interface and power management were placed on the soil moisture sensor, along with the low-power sensors. We added an analog switch to turn off the sensors when not being read to extend the life of the battery. Of course we ordered protos from OSH Park; we hand-assembled the board using a stencil from OSH Stencils and used the desktop reflow oven T-962. We also used Nick Poole’s Buzzard tool to get that adorable bear on the board.

The 100th Dorkbot SF is TONIGHT, June 27th, at DNA Lounge in San Francisco! 🎉🤖✨🛠️⚡️

Come to the 100th #dorkbotsf #dbsf100 at DNA – see Heather Gold Evo Heyning Julian Cash Chris Korda presentations, comedy, free pizza while they last! If you’re into AI, interactive immersive media, light painting and a cool synthesizer for pottery come celebrate with us!

 

Did you know that OSH Park grew out of the Dorkbot PDX (Portland) meetup?

Find a Dorkbot near you!

LTE Cellular Arduino Shield by Timothy Woo:

This powerful cellular shield can easily turn your project into a full-fledged phone with voice, SMS, LTE data, GPS, and more

Ever wanted to turn your Arduino into a phone with LTE technology? Sure, there are lots of 2G and 3G modules out there, but of the few that exist, not many LTE modules for Arduino are well-documented or are insanely expensive! With the SIM7500 shield that’s about to change! This shield not only has standard LTE technology with worldwide coverage but it also supports 3G, GPS positioning for asset tracking, and I’ve also thrown in an I2C temperature sensor in there as well, convenient for at least sending some data to the cloud. You’re also not stuck with using 5V Arduino; the shield allows you to configure your own logic voltage so you can interface this with Raspberry Pi and other 3.3V microcontrollers.

As a firm believer in great documentation I’ve set out on a journey to use just about every cellular module I can get my hands on, including theSIM7000module, this SIM7500 project, and hopefully others as well! Join me in this adventure, share your comments, and let’s get Arduino users all around the world connected to the cell towers!

 

From the Tindie blog:

Arduino 3D Graphics Shield Sets Sights on Windowed Desktop

When you’re pushing your Arduino to render graphics, the hardware side of things can get pretty messy. Building the keyboard interface and TVout on a breadboard is a potential solution, but you can run into problems like loose connections and data problems from breadboard capacitance. Dylan Brophy of the Nuclaer Tech store on Tindie has this problem licked.

The NGT30 is an Arduino Desktop Shield that circumvents many of these problems to streamline your development process. It has a keyboard port, VGA output, and advanced rendering functions to ensure a high FPS for your games or other graphics needs. The Propeller chip on the shield takes the heavy lifting off of the Arduino.

It’s capable of rendering basic text and color graphics to a VGA monitor, but it can also make 3D lines for rendering meshes, and you can store sprites for quick rendering later.

The GPU only uses two Arduino pins. Each pin can be selected to avoid conflicts. It’s a simple and elegant solution to a complex hardware problem. If you want to follow along with development, check out the details of the project over on Hackaday.io.