Earlier this year, Seeed Studio introduced the Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino that included the Arduino UNO compatible Seeduino Lotus board placed at the center and ten pre-wired and detachable Grove modules to get started with sensors on Arduino with no cabling whatsoever apart from the USB cable.
Arduino must have seen and liked the design, and Seeed Studio has collaborated with the Italian company to create the Arduino Sensor Kit Base with a very similar design, but with a twist as instead of an all-in-one platform with modules and an Arduino board, it’s a very large shield that seats on tops of Arduino UNO.
The Arduino Sensor Kit base includes the following:
- Base shield with 16 Grove connectors, instead of just 12 Grove connectors on the Beginner Kit, including 7x digital connectors, 4x analog connectors, 4x I2C connectors, and one UART connector; A 3.3V/5V voltage switch is also included
- 10 pre-wired modules without the requirements for breadboard nor jumper cables (same as Grove Beginner Kit)
- Grove LED
- Grove Buzzer
- Grove OLED Display 0.96″
- Grove Button
- Grove Rotary Potentiometer
- Grove Light
- Grove Sound
- Grove Temperature & Humidity Sensor
- Grove Air Pressure Sensor
- Grove 3-Axis Accelerator
- 6x Grove cables to connect additional sensors
As you can see in the photo above, the Arduino headers are exposed as well as the 6-pin ICSP header in order to connect it to the Arduino UNO board. If the ten sensors included in the kit are not enough, you can always add other Grove modules, or an Arduino shield to further expand the platform.
Arduino will provide the Arduino Sensor Kit Library wrapper that contains links to other libraries related to certain modules such as the accelerometer, air pressure sensor, temperature sensor, and the OLED display. There’s also be an online platform with ten lessons to learn how to use the included modules.
Arduino Sensor Kit Base is sold for $23 on Seeed Studioor the Arduino Store, where you’ll also find the $38.70 bundle kit with an Arduino UNO inside the package.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Normally I stop reading as soon as I see “Seeed Studio” (“Seeed Studio … the company that makes the profits on shipping”) … but I must say I like this board.
But Seeed Studio … so I won’t buy.
Consider the Arduino store. They ship from Italy. Free shipping from eur 95 onwards, no idea how much shipping is for smaller orders
So this thing has a next to useless inaccurate and unstable DHT11 temperature/humidity sensor on it. It does have a reasonably accurate and stable BOSCH BMP280 pressure/temperature sensor on it though. [Just remember to NOT take readings too fast/often from any of the BOSCH sensors (or really any sensitive sensor for that matter) or inaccuracies will appear due to self heating. Read the datasheet for guidelines.] I think Seeed should remove the useless DHT11 pressure/temperature sensor and replace the BMP280 pressure/temperature sensor ($1.48 ea./1K @ Mouser) with the BME280 pressure/temperature/humidity sensor ($2.54 ea./1K @ Digi-Key) instead. For a buck more in cost this would give the product an accurate and stable pressure/temperature/humidity sensor. And if they want to fill-in the empty position left over from the now missing DHT11, I think they should try to fill it with a rotary quadrature encoder.