11

Crowdfunding now

REGULAR

CROWDFUNDING

NOW

When backing a crowdfunding

campaign, you are not purchasing

a finished product, but supporting

a project working on something

new. There is a very real chance

that the product will never ship

and you’ll lose your money. It’s

a great way to support projects

you like and get some cheap

hardware in the process, but if

you use it purely as a chance to

snag cheap stuff, you may find

that you get burned.

BUYER

BEWARE!

here’s an abundance of connected microcontrollers

available these days. Whether you need Bluetooth,

WiFi, LoRaWAN, or almost any other way of

sending data across the airwaves, you can

find a board with access built-in. However, what

about the humble wired Ethernet? Many buildings have this

already wired-in, so attaching more devices is trivial, and with

Power over Ethernet, you don’t even need to worry about getting

electrons to your device.

There is, of course, the Raspberry Pi, but if you want a simpler

controller, you’ll have been limited to older boards, until now.

The wESP32 is, as you might have guessed, an ESP32 dual

core microcontroller with a wired Ethernet connection. WiFi

and Bluetooth are also available (as on all ESP32 modules), and

15 GPIOs are exposed for you to connect your own hardware,

sensors, or anything else you need.

Ethernet is – perhaps surprisingly – a good choice for IoT as it’s

much easier for devices to ‘just work’. There’s no pairing or setting

up of SSIDs – just pop in the cable and you should have network

access. Admittedly, this probably isn’t a convincing enough case

for anyone to set up a physical network if it doesn’t already exist,

but if you’ve got a network in place, why not use it for your IoT?

T

wESP32

The internet of wired things

From $55 hsmag.cc/xAEwDP Delivery: December 2018

Above

There’s also a

programmer board

that can help upload

code and work as a

serial connection

Left

Ethernet is inspired

by ALOHAnet, which

was a wireless

network at the

University of Hawaii.

It has its roots in

wireless, even though

it goes down wires

The wESP32 is, as you

might have guessed,

an ESP32 dual core

microcontroller with a

wired Ethernet connection

”

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