Going Green(house) with Cypress and SparkFun

The SparkFun Pioneer IoT Shield (Image source: DigiKey)

It is springtime, so that means it’s time to start your gardens. But up here in the north we don’t have the correct climate for all vegetation, so we use a greenhouse to help create the desired environment. Naturally, we will want to monitor our little environment to make sure we have the correct climate. Well, Cypress and SparkFun have us covered. Cypress has released their new PSoC 6 and partnered with SparkFun and DigiKey to make the Pioneer IoT shield for the PSoC line. The PSoC 6, with its integrated BLE and Pioneer shield with Xbee footprint, allows us to make a very quick and easy IoT gateway.

SparkFun has a project that uses the PSoC 6, Pioneer IoT shield, a PSoC 4, environmental sensor, Wi-Fi Xbee, and the website Thingspeak. This is a great project for remote monitoring of a greenhouse. With just a little modification to the code, we can add a second PSoC 4 and get just the data we want and make it easily legible. Having multiple PSoC 4 sensor nodes sending data to our PSoC 6 gateway allows us to cover a much wider area, or to check multiple areas.

This project is perfect for getting started with IoT. The SparkFun Pioneer IoT shield is a great way to interact with an array of sensors. The Cypress PSoC line of microcontrollers, especially with their new PSoC 6, is a great way to get a IoT network going with the built-in BLE. If you want to start making your own IoT network, take a look at these products to get a project running quick.