The Breadware Mega-B Development kit is one of the simplest ways of building an IoT product concept from ground-up available today. I was mindblown by how simple and perfect it was for me to create anything I wanted for a proof of concept. The only thing I needed to focus was on just the idea.
This very advantage of the kit motivated me to create this tutorial for people who might have great ideas for their respective fields, but are probably bound by not having knowledge or having dependency on many engineers to create a concept.
I thought out to start with something like a Humidity Checker which is a device to check for humidity levels locally.
You guys will be amazed as to how easily you could go about making a simple humidity checker without writing a single piece of code or dealing with any engineer to get this done at all.
The stuff required for you to build this is,
- A Mega-B Development Board - The Board will get you a concept ready in no time.
- Humidity Hardware module - One of the many modules from Breadware is the humidity module.
- Breadware Connect App - Need an Apple device to download for free, to control or check data to connect via the app.
- Breadware Flasher - To quickly flash the Firmware/Code auto-generated which is present online.
- https://dev.breadware.com/ - Your online on-the fly compiler and code-editor with no worry of losing the code or logic whatsoever.
Now, are you scared? Damn this list is quiet big and I don't know what all these jargon mean. Well, all the above exactly do what they mean with no extra knowledge expected from someone who wants to focus on getting the concept right. I created a step by step screenshot of how flawlessly easy it was for me to build a Humidity Checker in few minutes and can guess about less than 30 minutes for anybody out there who do not know anything except the definition of Humidity.
I divided this activity into three parts.
Part 1 -
The Basic Setup
Part 2 -
Building the App
Part 3 -
Auto-creating Firmware and flashing it.
Step 1 - Login/Signup to https://dev.breadware.com/
Step 2 - Create a new project and name it.
Step 3 - Choose the development kit you are using which is the Mega-B Bread Board in my case.
Step 4 - Connect your Breadware to your laptop/desktop using the USB cable like shown below.
Create a Blank Template project. That's because I promised you that we would do this project from scratch!
Step 5 - Drag and drop the module Humidity Sensor from the simple UI.
Step 6 - Type the hardware module name the way you want to identify it with, like I named it humidity_0. In the same way on the Breadware board, plant the Humidity module on the M3 slot like it was dragged in the UI. That's pretty neat.
Step 1 - Download the Breadware Connect app for free from the Apple store for your Apple device or from the Google Play Store on your Android device.
Step 2 - Then go back to the developer site and go to the Design App section. Click on Add App Text though there are many various options for designing the interface. We will stick to the most basic one for now.
PS - You can also set your background color to create a feel for the app.
Step 3 - Provide a simple name for the App Text. In this case we label it test data as humidity_data.
Step 4 - Click on App Data Display to create a box to display Current Humidity data.
PS - Do not forget to save whatever you do on the developer site. Click on File Save.
Step 1 - Well, now we come to the coding part.... and damn you must be hating this part if you are someone who just wants to get done with your job without wanting to deal with Syntax and Semantics. So... go on.
Click on Edit Firmware.
Step 2 - Wow! Need to code now. Well.. actually NO.
Click on Add If/Then Rule.
If humidity_0 module is more than 0 percent then display humidity_data module on the app.
Whoa! The code is generated and we are DONE! Now verify any errors for the generated code, which mostly is almost always correct. Save again.
Step 4 - Connect the Breadware board. Open the Breadware flasher and refresh your projects to see your latest added project to select it. Click on Flash Firmware
Step 5 - Now, enable bluetooth on your iPhone. Open the Bread Connect App, it detects your nearby BreadWare device vai bluetooth. Click on the detected device and you see the Current Humidity on the App which will keep changing with the changing humidity.
Some more advantage of this specific development board I felt is that you can also download your past application data from your project which is being uploaded continuously in form of .CSV file. This is pretty cool for someone who wants to track his idea on a daily basis!
Do let me know how you liked this project of mine, as I realized it is something which nobody has tried yet, and hence looked compelling enough to show at how easily a product can be implemented using the Breadware development kit.
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