Grove Starter Kit With LinkIt One

Introduction

 

Here are the previous parts:

• Pointing the Spotlight on LinkIt ONE
• Getting Started with LinkItOne
• Getting Familiar with Arduino IDE: LinkItOne
• Hello World With LinkIt One

When I started with IoT I was all confused about electronics stuff, resistors, and circuits, then I got Seeed Studio’s Grove Starter Kit plus. With this, we have to just plug the sensor modules instead of managing it through soldering or breadboard. So let us see how easily we can get started with the Internet of Things with Grove Starter Kit without worrying about electronic components and circuits. The Grove Starter Kit is a complete development kit that consists of a collection of sensors, actuators, and shields. It is a hardware and software solution to help you explore the IoT space and create innovative projects. The Grove Starter Kit is a better choice because It accelerates development and testing with IoT. The Grove shield and sensors have 4 pin connectors that allow us to plug in the sensor with ease rather than managing circuits and sensors using a breadboard. The Grove shield has been tested as compatible with Windows by the Windows IoT team. There is a huge variety of sensor modules available with Seed Studio. If you are new to IoT, the Seed Studio Grove Starter Kit will help you to easily get started with development since you need not worry about circuits and other electronics stuff. With Grove shield and sensor modules, you can easily create anything without worrying about electronic components much. There is no need to manage sensors using soldering or a breadboard. This article will guide you about how to set up and get running with the Grove Starter Kit plus and LinkIt One. The booklet contains instructions about basic sketches with Grove Starter Kit Plus.

 

Required Components

 

• Grove Starter Kit for LinkIt ONE
• LinkIt One Board

I am using Grove Starter kit IoT edition which works fine with LinkIt One.

 

Setting Up

• Setup the Dev Environment
• Download the Seeed Studios Sketchbook Starter for LinkIt One

Adding SketchBook to Arduino IDE

 

 

 

Extract the downloaded Sketchbook Starter. Open Arduino IDE. Select “File", then "Preferences”.

 

View the “Sketchbook Location” field.

 

Click “Browse” and copy the Seeed Studios Sketches folder you downloaded into the resulting folder and rename it something like “Sketchbook_Grove”. Restart your Arduino IDE.

 

Making Connections

1. Connect LinkIt One to your computer using a USB A to micro B cable.
2. In the Arduino IDE, go to the Tools pull-down menu at the top, select Board, and make sure “LinkIt One” is checked.
3. Then pull down the Tools menu again, and select appropriate Serial Port.

Adding Grove Base Shield

 

 

In the Grove, kit pull up the Pink Styrofoam underneath the LED screen to locate the Base Shield. 

 

The Base Shield has a variety of 4-pin plugs for connecting various sensors to LinkIt One. Now attach the Base Shield to the LinkIt One board and press down firmly. A green LED on the Base Shield will turn on when it is powered up.

 

Displaying Hello world on LCD

 

In the Grove, Starter Kit Plus locate the 16 *2 LCD. Using one of the wires provided in the kit, attach it to your Base Shield unit. Be sure to plug it into the port marked I2C.

 

 

Running up your first sketch

 

Download the RGB LCD backlit library from here.

 

Add it to Arduino IDE. Restart Arduino IDE and create a new sketch. Paste the following code,

 

Code

#include <Wire.h>
# include "rgb_lcd.h"
rgb_lcd lcd;
void setup()
{
    // set up the LCD's number of columns and rows:
    lcd.begin(16, 2);
    // Print a message to the LCD.
    lcd.print("hello, world!");
}
void loop()
{
    // Turn off the display:
    lcd.noDisplay();
    delay(500);
    // Turn on the display:
    lcd.display();
    delay(500);
}

Click the “Upload” button. You should see a “Transfer Complete” message if it is successfully deployed.

 

Now a "Hello World" message is displayed on your LCD. Grove sensors are very easy to use. Similarly, you can play around with different sensors in the kit with the help of sample examples we downloaded for Grove kit.