Pointing The Spotlight On LinkIt ONE

Introduction

The new IoT board LinkIt ONE co-designed by Mediatek and Seed Studios is an open-source, high-performance board for prototyping Wearables and IoT devices. It is a small board based on SoC that comes with onboard Wi-Fi, GSM and GPRS that makes it a powerful board for connected devices. The pin layout of the board is exactly similar to Arduino, making the development easy with many Arduino compatible shields and sensors. It comes at an affordable price of $ 59, you can get it from here. Let’s have a look on its features-

Features:

It includes GSM, GPRS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth BR/EDR/BLE, GPS, ARM7 EJ-S, and SD card connector onboard.
Pinout is similar to Arduino Boards.
Grove Compatible interface.
Audio Codec.
Energy-efficient.

Specification

Chipset	MT2502A (Aster, ARM7 EJ-S (TM) )
Clock Speed	260MHz
Dimensions	3.3x2.1 inches
Flash	16MB
RAM	4MB
DC Current Per I/O Pin	1mA
Analog Pins	3
Digital Output	3.3V
Analog Input	5V
UART	Software-based(Serial), also known as USB Modem Port and Hardware Serial(Serial1, D0&D1)
SD Card	Up to 32GB(Class 10)
Positioning	GPS(MT3332)
GSM	850/900/1800/1900 MHz
GPRS	Class 12
Wi-Fi	802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth	BR/EDR/BLE(Dual Mode)

Development Environment

Mediatek has provided LinkIt ONE Software Development Kit (SDK) for developing apps for LinkIt ONE devices. It consist of a SDK that integrates with the Arduino software to deliver a familiar development environment. With this SDK the existing Arduino apps can be easily ported. The SDK compiles Arduino Sketches into LinkIt ONE execution file format (.vxp). It includes LinkIt ONE API libraries supporting the core Arduino functions and LinkIt ONE communication features like-

2G mobile network (GSM and GPRS).
GNSS (GPS, GLONASS and BeiDou).
Bluetooth (2.1 and 4.0).
Wi-Fi.

Hardware

The Linkit One development board comes with dual Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, GSM (2G) and GPS/GLONASS antennas as well as a 3.7V Li-battery. It is easy to get started with Grove shield and sensors as they are compatible with this board.

There are 3 slide switches on LinkIt ONE which are used to configure the function/working mode, which makes the board little complex for the beginner and hence it is highly suggested to read the user manual once before getting started.

This board offers a range of awesome features that make ideal for IoT applications and it comes with an affordable price too, we will keep leveraging this power-packed board from the complete beginning from installation and configuration to making some high-end applications with cloud.