7

Simba-Pro

REVIEW

he Simba-Pro IoT module is a

Bluetooth dev board built on an

ARM Cortex-M4, with a whole

lot of extra features. There are

position sensors (accelerometer, gyro,

magnetometer), environment sensors

(temperature, humidity, pressure, light, microphone),

and ways of interacting with the user, including a

button and a red-green LED. You can also add onto

this with a wide range of expansions via the GPIO pins

that support I^2 C, SPI, CAN, UART, and PWM. This is all

packed into a board smaller than an SD card.

There’s obviously a lot on this board, and you could

do a lot of projects without needing any expansions.

In these cases, the tiny size and light weight are a

huge advantage. The more you have to add on to this

core, the more you lose the key advantage of its size.

There’s a bundle of software for working with it,

including the usual Arduino IDE board definition.

Particularly intriguingly, there are frameworks for

Android and iOS software that can work with it

reading the sensor data. For software devs who don’t

want to get dirty in hardware, this provides an easy

introduction to building software which

interfaces more with the real

world. It would, for

example, allow

you to build a Wii

Nunchuk-style

input device

without having

to get out your

soldering iron

or breadboard.

There’s

a sample

application that

you can run

without even

T

Simba-Pro

touching the hardware – just power it up and you can

get the info you need off the device.

While the documentation for the project isn’t

awful, neither is it great. The information you need is

likely to be on the website, but it won’t necessarily

be easy to find or understand, especially if you’re

new to embedded hardware development. This is a

slightly unusual situation: it’s an interesting option for

real beginners because you can do so much without

having to worry about the hardware, but it’s not a

great option for intermediate users because once

you do have to start worrying about the hardware,

it’s not as simple as many other options. The more

you need to add to it, the more you’re

likely to get bogged down

by the documentation

and relatively small

community of hobbyist

developers on

this platform. For

advanced users, the

advantages kick in

again – provided

you don’t need to

add too much to

it, it’s still small,

low power, and

quick to get

started with.

By Ben Everard ben_everard

A feature-

packed board

for Bluetooth

development,

but with

some quirks.

7 / 10

VERDICT

Above

There’s a whole lot

of sensors in this

tiny PCB

Below

The CR2032 battery

only just fits between

the headers

A minuscule Bluetooth dev board with a lot of features

SENSIEDGE $70 sensiedge.com