The Wio Terminal - Integrated Making?

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Sun, 02 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Please note: Seeed Technology Co Ltd (aka Seeed Studio) provided the Wio Terminal for use in this post. I have not been compensated in any other way for this post. If you’re not familiar with Seeed, there’s an introduction to their offerings at the bottom.

While the Arduino and similar development boards have been available for more than a decade, there has been a trend as of late to abstract away the hardware aspects and allow users to focus on it at a higher level. First, we had standard interfaces to which you could attach “shields”, “hats”, “featherwings”, or other add-on boards. Then came options like Seeed’s Grove System and SparkFun’s Qwiic, which were both I2C busses exposed over a standardized connector, allowing the connection of many peripherals at once. There’s also been an expansion into development boards with built-in sensors and outputs, like Adafruit’s Circuit Playground. The Wio Terminal is the most sophisticated and complete incarnation of this trend that I’ve seen thus far.

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The first thing you’ll notice about the Wio Terminal is it’s 2.4" LCD screen, but under the hood, it’s powered by an Atmel SAMD51 Microcontoller (120 MHz ARM Cortex M4F) paired with a Realtek RTL8720DN for WiFi and BLE. It has a 5 way switch, multiple buttons, and a Micro-SD card slot. Embedded peripherals include an accelerometer, microphone, speaker, and light sensor. I/O is available via a Raspberry Pi compatible 40 pin header, 2 Grove interfaces, and USB type C.

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The Wio Terminal - Integrated Making?