Giving Your Sensor Breakouts Some Order
One of the easiest ways to get started using sensors is one of those 30 sensor kits you can pick up online. In the best-case scenario, you get a plastic bin with loosely labeled sensors in different pockets, other times you get a cardboard box with dozens of plastic baggies for each sensor, just floating around like a chaotic nebula of detectors. Actually using these kits just adds entropy to the system, growing and growing until all you have left is an unorganized freezer bag of sensors, all unlabeled, of course. That’s why the Sensor Array Kit caught my attention since it’s both a Learn-to-Solder kit and a way to keep four sensors and a microSD card breakout all neat and organized for continued use.
This board includes a DHT11 sensor, for measuring both temperature and humidity, a photoresistor, and an analog microphone that filters through an LM386 amplifier IC. The microphone and photoresistor are both analog signals, while the DHT11 is read with a digital pin on the Arduino, all great first steps for exploring peripherals on the beloved Arduino. Once those are mastered, you can integrate the microSD card via the SPI protocol to add data logging functionality to the project. And if this is all sounding like a bit too much to remember, there’s a wonderfully illustrated 40-page manual by the maker to walk you through assembly and coding, step-by-step.
This board comes from ShortCircuits out of the United Kingdom, and if you think that this is a standalone product, I’m happy to inform you you’re wrong! They have not only a motherboard kit featuring a broken-out Arduino Uno with an RTC, an RGB LED matrix kit, and more! And best of all, these PCBs are all designed to stack on top of one another, meaning the combinations in both hardware and code are limitless!