Whew! You should now have a good sense of what you can do with Adafruit IO - how feeds, dashboards and services all work together to get your data stored, plotted and interacting. Compared to many IoT services, there’s a lot you can do! So who is Adafruit IO for?

The short answer is, everyone!

Entry-Level

Adafruit IO can be used by entry-level Makers who want to make a remote-control lamp, to advanced engineers who want to automate their factory. Scientists could use IO to log experiment data in real-time and download or organize gathered data. Home automators can connect sensors to their HVAC system to minimize power usage. Roboticists can control and monitor their mechatronics remotely from around the world. Students can build interactive art creations that tie with social media services and light up whenever their posts get a like. With the powerful single board computers and low cost microcontroller boards available, even a first project or a custom one-off product can now be connected and controlled over the Internet.

Makers

We’ve designed IO to be simple and quick to start, for experimenters and Makers of all sorts. Sending data to the cloud is easy to implement with Adafruit IO, pre-existing projects can be converted easily to an Adafruit IO project, control their projects from the Internet. Add Internet-connectivity to household appliances, wearables, art installations, etc.

Engineers

But behind this simplicity, we have made Adafruit IO robust enough to handle the demands of industrial-level engineering without the complexity of enterprise services. We have pre-built APIs to have code communicate with Adafruit IO, data-logging, webhooks and service integration so you can easily prototype an IoT product before taking the next step and scaling for production. It’s a great place to put together prototypes, and build customized projects for small businesses. We’ll note that it’s not aimed at building and commercializing business-to-customer or business-to-business IoT projects, check out our previous Services video for some suggestions on enterprise-level IoT services. Those will be a big step up in complexity, and won’t have the same friendly integrations so they’re a good step up once you’ve got Adafruit IO going.

If you’re curious about what people are using Adafruit IO for and maybe get some inspiration or validation for your ideas, please check out the Adafruit discord channel (#help-with-adafruitio channel), our Adafruit IO forum, the Adafruit blog,  and the Adafruit Learning System, where we’ve got dozens of IoT projects with code and wiring diagrams, from the basics of a button, to how to automate an entire house.

This guide was first published on Mar 14, 2019. It was last updated on Mar 18, 2024.

This page (Who is Adafruit.IO for?) was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

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