I received an Arduino Oplà IoT Kit as a mystery prize in the Save the Bees Design Challenge. This is a quick look at it and what it can do....
Oplà seems to be a village near Milan or a bar in Milan or a restaurant.
The kit can be set up to implement 8 IoT applications documented on the Arduino web site and of course many more designed by the user. The Arduino tutorials for the 8 suggested applications are quite well done, but I did run into an incompatibility with the latest libraries. I had to revert to version 1.2.2 of the DotStar library from Adafruit for some of the software to work.
I wanted to display some custom graphics, which are not yet documented fully, so I spent some time figuring out the display format expected by the libraries and then used a spreadsheet to calculate the graphics array.
The capacitance "touch" sensors can be set to sense at least 1 cm from the PCB, which is pretty impressive. The kit is not cheap, but it cost only about half as much as buying the components separately. Overall, it is a fun kit to learn on with a nice variety of applications to explore, and it comes with a well designed case - it would be tough to 3D print such a case.
Links:
https://opla.arduino.cc/opla/module/carrier/lesson/discovering-the-mkr-iot-carrier
https://opla.arduino.cc/opla/module/cloud/lesson/getting-started-with-the-cloud-short
https://opla.arduino.cc/opla/module/iot-starter-kit-maker/lesson/01-remote-controlled-lights
https://opla.arduino.cc/opla/module/iot-starter-kit-maker/lesson/02-personal-weather-station
https://opla.arduino.cc/opla/module/iot-starter-kit-maker/lesson/03-home-security-alarm
https://opla.arduino.cc/opla/module/iot-starter-kit-maker/lesson/06-smart-garden
https://opla.arduino.cc/opla/module/iot-starter-kit-maker/lesson/08-thinking-about-you
https://opla.arduino.cc/opla/module/iot-starter-kit-maker/lesson/05-inventory-control
https://opla.arduino.cc/opla/module/iot-starter-kit-maker/lesson/07-thermostat-control
https://opla.arduino.cc/opla/module/iot-starter-kit-maker/lesson/04-solar-system-tracker
