New Feature: UART Components Now Supported on Adafruit.io WipperSnapper!

The Adafruit IO team has released support for UART components in Adafruit.io and the Adafruit.io WipperSnapper Firmware. Physical hardware that uses the UART protocol like the PMS5003 Air Quality Sensor can now connect to your no-code Adafruit IO projects.

Why are we excited?

Support for the UART serial protocol allows us to add new types of components we could not previously add. By exposing this functionality to you, the users, we can widen the number of IoT electronics projects that can be supported with Adafruit IO and WipperSnapper.

Get Started with UART and WipperSnapper

Assuming you’ve already set up a board with the absolute latest WipperSnapper firmware and connected it to Adafruit IO:

1. Physically wire up your UART component.
2. From the board page, click New Component.
3. From the component picker, under UART Components, select the UART component you’d like to add to your project.
4. Set the interval for how often the component sends data back to Adafruit IO, and what data to send.
5. Click Create Component!

As soon as the interval elapses, your board will send data from the UART component to Adafruit IO!

Technical Details

If supported by the development board connected to WipperSnapper, we default to the hardware UART communication implementation. However, some boards that run WipperSnapper firmware lack support for hardware UART. For these boards, we automatically switch to a software UART implementation.

The JSON definition representing each board, like this one for the Feather ESP32 V2, now contains a mapping of the board’s physical UART pins.

Can I add my favorite UART Component to Adafruit IO?

Yes, though it’s not fully documented yet. If you’re super-eager, you may be able to piece it together using our guide about adding a new component to WipperSnapper, the JSON schema for a UART component, and the example UART component JSON definition.

What about Support for the GPS Modules you sell?

The GPS modules sold by Adafruit, like the Ultimate GPS Module and Mini GPS module, use the UART serial protocol. Previously, due to a lack of UART support, we were not able to integrate these components into WipperSnapper. Now that we can support UART serial communication, we’ll add no-code GPS support to Adafruit IO (likely sometime this month).

As usual, we’ll publish project guides to follow along with. We’re eager to see what the maker community will now build with Adafruit IO!

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• Source: https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/10/02/new-feature-uart-components-now-supported-on-adafruit-io-wippersnapper/