There’s an abundance of connected microcontrollers available these days. Whether you need Bluetooth, WiFi, LoRaWAN, or almost any other way of sending data across the airwaves, you can find a board with access built-in. However, what about the humble wired Ethernet? Many buildings have this already wired-in, so attaching more devices is trivial, and with Power over Ethernet, you don’t even need to worry about getting electrons to your device.

There is, of course, the Raspberry Pi, but if you want a simpler controller, you’ll have been limited to older boards, until now. The wESP32 is, as you might have guessed, an ESP32 dual core microcontroller with a wired Ethernet connection. WiFi and Bluetooth are also available (as on all ESP32 modules), and 15 GPIOs are exposed for you to connect your own hardware, sensors, or anything else you need.

Ethernet is – perhaps surprisingly – a good choice for IoT as it’s much easier for devices to ‘just work’. There’s no pairing or setting up of SSIDs – just pop in the cable and you should have network access. Admittedly, this probably isn’t a convincing enough case for anyone to set up a physical network if it doesn’t already exist, but if you’ve got a network in place, why not use it for your IoT?

From $55 hsmag.cc/xAEwDP Delivery: December 2018