Seeed Grove connectors?

Seeed Grove is looking pretty popular now, with stuff like their Starter Kit.

I think that's something that Espruino has been missing really - nice plug and play modules for people that want them. Would anyone be interested if I made a little adaptor board? Just something with a socket for a Pinned Espruino, and then a bunch of Grove sockets.

I would not be interested - this doesn't mean it's a bad idea though. I have a terribly low opinion of arduino $hields and all these "plug and play" electronics.

It all depends - as usual...

An audience who wants to get started in a very light weight way, and audience who still afraid of actually placing individual wires and connections between individual pins for fear of 'frying' things, prebuilt stuff with very limited flexibility it is the answer. After leraning to 'sit' and getting excited about the possibilities, prebuilt stuff pretty quickly is left behind.

But lowering the entry treshold is very important.

A few selected setups can be very successfull and open the world for many who would otherwise not even think about doing IoT.

i am a brand new owner of 2 pinned picos* (proud to be able to control the LED for starters) and i would really love to have some kits available

• starter kit
  
  • breadboard and such
    
• for those absolute beginners, who really will and want to learn soldering, but lets play first
  
  • the seeed grove concept looks perfect
    
  • wifi kit (pre-soldered ESP8266+shim+pico + maybe the often needed condensator?)
    
  • bluetooth kit (HC-05 shim possible?)
    
    

right now i have to learn all at once (electronics is hard enough, but there is more ! soldering, which tools? pliers, multimeter, etc. etc.) for me it is part of the fun and at least i have a solid programming background

tldr: for absolute beginners it would be more and immediate fun to have some (quick-)starter kits

*) ordered via tindie.com, thx for the fast delivery

Thanks! yes, I think a WiFi/Bluetooth board that you could plug straight into with a pinned Pico would be a really good idea. It'd be bigger than the shim and would use some of the 0.1" pins, but I doubt people would actually be that worried?

The KickStarter starter kit was good and I'd meant to keep selling them after, but actually the amount of small parts in there made it a real pain to put together - and the size meant it cost quite a bit to post and couldn't be put through a letter box (so more got lost). I think a kit without a relay would help with that at least - I've just put a post up asking for ideas so it'd be great if anyone had any input.

Any other thoughts about Grove? It's definitely a beginner thing, and if I'm honest I was totally underwhelmed when I saw the kit - but I went to a hack day last year and the people there loved it. For that kind of thing it makes a load of sense - you don't want loads of single wires kicking around, and you definitely don't want half your Picos and boards blown up because power wires were plugged in the wrong way around :)

Just an update to this - I added some simple JS modules for using Grove system components.

It turns out the Arduino Adaptor works quite well with it (I hadn't been selling that because I hadn't tested it enough), but as the starter kits basically all come with an Arduino adaptor anyway, it makes sense to use it.

Hello Gordon,

Just a quick thumbs-up for some sort of expansion board (Grove, Arduino or other). I have been playing with my Pico, and it is very nice to work with, but I have been puzzling how to actually put it in a project that is not tied to the USB port. Without USB, some other form of communication will be necessary. I am also playing with the ESP8266-12 (the Adafruit board) which I like very much. At $10 each for the chip and breakout, I think it may be the easiest way to get wifi to the Pico. A Grove header would be useful for quick connections, and some way to get to the 0.05" pins, which are useless to me now.

Cheers, Duane

Thanks - actually Seeed provide a Grove WiFi module, so that could be quite interesting once a Grove adaptor is done.

But yes, with the Adafruit module I think you only have to connect 4 wires to get WiFi on Espruino. If you have the Pinned Pico then you can do it just with female jumper wires and no soldering.