Coral Environmental Sensor Board

Google has released a new Raspberry Pi product under its Coral brand (previously AIY Projects). The Environmental Sensor Board adds a range of sensors and a 128×32 OLED display to the Pi.

More importantly, the board is designed to connect securely to Google’s Cloud IoT Core service, enabling you to securely transmit data and perform detailed analysis on it (with Google’s range of ML tools).

Connecting to Google IoT Cloud

The Environmental Sensor Board connects to Google IoT Cloud platform via a Microchip ECC608 crypto chip with Google keys.

On the board, you’ll find a HDC2010 humidity sensor, OPT3002 ambient light sensor, and BMP280 barometric pressure sensor, along with UART, I2C, and PWM connections. A full datasheet can be found here.

The new board also sports four Grove connectors, enabling you to quickly attach additional components for prototyping without needing to use jumper wires or a soldering iron.

Google has documentation for a couple of Python classes, both of which we’re looking at closely for potential The MagPi tutorials. The first is coral.enviro.board, described as “an interface for all input and output modules”; the second is coral.cloudiot.core, which “manages a connection to Google Cloud IoT Core via MQTT, using a JWT for device authentication.”

The Environmental Sensor Board costs £20.62 / $24.95, and is available now from Mouser.com.