Arduino MKR WiFi 1010 board
Arduino MKR WiFi 1010 board, so today we are going to discuss the new And answer a lot of the questions that you might have about it.
We hope that this article will help and make your life a bit easier.
What is Arduino Uno
First of all, on the off chance that you don’t know what Arduino Uno is. It’s basically an open base microcontroller board. It is a revolutionary piece of machinery due to its simplicity, and by simplicity, we mean ease of use.
New features on MKR WiFi 1010 Board
Now there is a new Arduino Uno series, and we are thinking history is going to repeat itself.
The new series has a built-in WIFI and Bluetooth connectivity. The closest thing we can compare it to is an IoT board. It also has a variety of shields for different projects, and today we are going to discuss all of that.
Unboxing Arduino MKR WiFi 1010 board
Once you receive the box containing the new Arduino Uno MKR.
At the top, you will see the “Mcair Wifi 10-10” branding.
At the back, you will see important information about the product and its specifications.
The authentication sticker will be on one side.
After opening the box, the first thing you will see is the board with its male and female headers.
Then, you will see the manual which is in English, and a few stickers.
MKR WiFi 1010 Specifications
Now, on to the board specification and details.
- The core of the Arduino board is SAM D21 Cortex–M0+. Which is a 32-bit low power arm microcontroller clocked at 48-megahertz clock frequency.
- It also has the u-blox NINA-W102 which is an ESP32 bare chip. Which is what adds the Wi-fi and Bluetooth connectivity option to this board.
- The board has 256 KB of flash memory with 32 KB of SRAM. And unfortunately, it doesn’t have an EEPROM built-in. It also has eight digital I/O pins 13 PWM pins, and dedicated UART, SPI, and I2C pins.
- Regarding the Analog, the board has 7 analog input pins and one Analog output pin, and 10 external interrupts.
- The Arduino board has a built-in LED, which is connected to the digital pin 6, and an RGB LED which is connected to the u-blox NINA.
- There is also a dedicated I2C connector.
- The board has a LiPo battery connector that contains a built-in battery management circuit.
How to use it?
Now, Let’s answer your biggest question, how do you use it?
You will need an Arduino IDE, then you will need to add the board package.
- Go to tools.
- Go to board manager.
- Type MKR in the board manager, press enter and congratulations you found the supported board packages.
If your board package isn’t installed, just install it and you will be good to go, you will be able to upload your first code, it usually doesn’t take long to upload just a few seconds.
If you open up your Arduino IDE, and open the code or “sketch” that you uploaded, you will find it exactly the same as when using the ESP21 board. So, you will just need to provide the authentication token, name, password, and logic.
If you just want to switch the built-in LED in the board on/off you don’t need to provide anything. You will also be able to control the built-in LED in the Arduino board using your blink IOT platform, you will find that it works just fine with even less latency.
Using on Arduino cloud platform
In order to use the Arduino cloud platform.
- Go to the Arduino IOT cloud, and make an account if you don’t already have one.
- Go to the device section and choose to add a device. Select the setup as an Arduino device. The device’s WIFI will be immediately recognized by the cloud, just make sure that you have the Arduino create agent installed and running in the background.
- Click on the configure button, and it will give a random name that you can change to one of your choosing.
- Press the “Next” button, it will take some time to configure so get comfortable.
- Click “Done” button, and that’s it you are all set. You will be able to see the device inside of the device section.
After that you will need to go and add a variable in the create a thing section, and you will be doing a small project.
For example, will be able to control the built-in LED using the Arduino IDE cloud dashboard, after creating the variable you will need to select a device, and click on associate to connect it to the board.
And lastly, you will need to configure the Networks, so you will have to provide the site name and password and save that information.
After that, you can upload the “sketch” that you want using the same IOT cloud platform, and there will be no need to switch on to the Arduino IDE, and just provide the task that you want.
You will be able to control it using the IOT cloud mobile application dashboard by Arduino.
You can also find a bit of challenge in controlling the built-in RGB LED, as you will not have any available code to control it, but we did find a bit of a workaround.
Control built-in RGB LED on MKR WiFi 1010 board
There are two steps used to build the RGB LED in the board
- Install the WiFiNINA library.
- The library needs to be modified to be compatible with the RGB LED.
In order to install the WiFiNINA library, go to sketch then into include library, then to manage library, and search for WiFiNINA library, once the search is complete click on the install button and it will automatically install on your computer.
After that you will need to do the second step, you will need to go into the library folder of the audio, you will find it inside the documents, search for the WiFiNINA, once the search is complete open the folder which will be the source folder, you will find two files one will say WIFI.CPP and the other WIFI.H which is the header file and the C++ library you will need to open both, then add the code and the function, and inside the header file add the functions. After completing these configurations, you will be able to use the built-in RGB LED.
To test it out, you can create and upload the code, and after uploading you will be able to see that the LED is working according to the code you wrote on the Arduino IDE.
We hope that we simplified things for you and made it clearer.
If you guys have any questions don’t hesitate to leave us a comment and we will answer.
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