USB Dongle To Detect Motion, Noise, and Light!
PIR sensors are great for presence detection, and using a light or sound sensor can tell you a lot about the ambient environment. This type of data is useful for a variety of situations, especially when it comes to home automation. While these sensors are fairly easy to hook up, getting the data in a nice format to an embedded PC normally takes some development time, as you need to calibrate the device and set up the whole system.
The uThing::MNL noise, motion and light USB dongle from Ohmtech.io shortcuts this process, and allows you to simpy plug all three of these sensors in at once as a USB device. It can output data to Linux, MacOS, Windows, and even Android systems with no extra driver or software requried, and uses an STM32L412 MCU for processing. The dongle acts as a virtual com port, allowing you to save data in a CSV format with a simple test command when running Mac/Linux.
They also offer the uBridge aplication for working with it (and their uThing::VOC Air Quality Dongle) to display to dashboards, produce CSV files, publish to databases, and work with MQTT servers. For a quick way to get up and running with IoT applications without the hassle of wiring sensors up or programming an interface from scratch, the uThing looks like a great solution!