Practical IoT Microcontroller Trainer Is Practical

How many projects begin with wiring a microcontroller, buttons, LEDs, and an LCD screen to a breadboard? Whether your answer is once-in-a-while or very often, like Josh Kittle of Project: Blue Smoke Monster, you need to check out his Practical IoT Microcontroller Trainer kit. It contains all of the essential elements used to prototype microcontroller-based electronic circuits.

The most striking feature of the Practical IoT microcontroller trainer (PIOT) is the big breadboard area. Surrounding it are many pin headers grouped by microcontroller or peripheral. A full PIOT kit contains the following microcontroller boards:

• ESP32
• ESP8266 (ESP01)
• Arduino-compatible Nano
• And header for Raspberry Pi

The one board you must supply yourself is the Pi. However, the space provided does fit either a Pi Zero or Pi Zero W. Of course, full-sized Pi will work as well since they all share the same GPIO header.

At first, the mix of multiple MCUs might seem like overkill. While you could probably use them all in a single project, that does not appear to be the intent. Instead, the PIOT enables you to choose which platform you want to work with while providing easy access to popular peripherals. The on-board peripherals include:

• BT-05 Bluetooth module
• 0.96 OLED screen with SSD1306 controller
• A 2.4" resistive touchscreen
• 4 push buttons
• 4 WS8212 LEDs (aka NeoPixels)
• 2 Rotary encoders
• On-board power supply

A key benefit is saving the time it takes to gather each of these components. Instead of fumbling through your parts boxes, PIOT allows you to get to wiring your circuit and writing code.

The board also has flexibility in how it gets powered. Either a microcontroller's regulator board can provide the 3.3 and 5V rails or an on-board regulator can step-down from 9V.

You can purchase an unassembled PIOT kit from Blue Smoke Monster's Tindie store. If you already have some of the hardware included, you can also grab just the PCB from BSM's website.