Blackiot's Polverine Is a Compact Bosch-Packing mikroBUS Board for Environmental Monitoring

Internet of Things (IoT) specialist Blackiot is working on a compact mikroBUS sensor board designed for environmental monitoring, including air quality, temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure: the Espressif ESP32-S3-based Polverine.

"The Polverine project is a mikroBUS board designed for environmental sensing and monitoring applications," Blackiot explains of its design. "The board can be programmed with Arduino [IDE], Eclipse, or PlatformIO/Visual Studio IDEs, enabling rapid application development. The board is complemented with demo firmware for rapid sensor evaluation."

Built around an Espressif ESP32-S3-MINI-1 module, giving it two Tensilica Xtensa LX7 cores running at up to 240MHz, 512kB of pseudo-static RAM (SRAM), and 8MB of flash memory plus on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radios, the Polverine aims to deliver all-in-one environmental sensing. It includes a Bosch Sensortec BME688 gas sensor, delivering temperature, pressure, and humidity readings, plus an air quality metric based on detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon monoxide, and other pollutants.

Alongside this is a Bosch Sensortec BMV080, a fan-free 2.5-micron particular matter (PM2.5) sensor claimed to be the world's smallest — ">450 times smaller in volume than any comparable device on the market," Bosch says. The sensors are made available over the board's mikroBUS connector or via USB Type-C, while there's also a Qwiic connector for external hardware and unused general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins including SPI, I2C, UART, pulse-width modulation, and analog inputs.

More information on the Polverine is available on Hackaday.io, with demo source code published to GitHub under the permissive MIT license. Blackiot has not yet announced availability and pricing for the board.