The GPS System has to be one of the most brilliant things ever invented. ~30 sattelites in orbit that can tell you where you are anywhere on the globe, with precision down to about 2 meters. Of course you and your Arduino should get in on the action! We’ll also look into plotting our data in the Google maps API.
If you need to control a lot of inputs / outputs on a MicroController, Shift registers are the way to go. In this project I’m using shift registers to build a circuit that control endless LEDS from 5 pins of a Micro controller
Homemade Shift register Module
I’m making a LED display inspired by the old-timey neon signs with handwritten font; The LEDs will light up one by one to illuminate the sign. In this project i used the Digispark attiny85: These tiny boards only have 6 GPIO pins so to manage a large amount of LEDS with a limited number of pins, you’ll need shift registers.
A fun IoT starter project is temperature sensors: Everyone cares about the weather. I am using the esp8266 and a DS18b20 sensor to post the temperature on my balcony to twitter.
Twitter update made by my balcony
For the current version of this project i`m using a Wemos D1 Mini that i had laying around: rev1 used an ESP8266-01, but that version of the esp has some disadvantages when it comes to IoT Sensor applications: Power management