Hornbill kits for the Internet of Things

By on April 14, 2017
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Hornbill is a development platform for the Internet of Things. It’s a set of hardware tools, firmware, and templates for local and cloud-based apps for controlling your project. It’s for makers, engineers, and small companies who want to build secure and robust network-connected things at a fraction of the cost of other platforms.

The IoT-oriented and open source Hornbill development board runs FreeRTOS on an ESP32 wireless module, and is available in several Hornbill kits. The demos that run on the various kits were developed with the open source Espressif Internet Development Framework (ESP-IDF), a set of C APIs to access lower level hardware functionality.
The Hornbill boards are built around Espressif’s open source ESP-WROOM32 reference module, which is based on its similarly open source ESP32 system-on-chip.

The main product is the $12 Hornbill ESP32 Dev, a breadboard-friendly board with a micro-USB to serial port, a single-cell LiPo charger, and the wireless-ready ESP-WROOM32 module. This PCB can be soldered onto the Hornbill Proto baseboard, which offers a microSD slot, temperature and humidity sensors, IR transmitters and receivers, and lots of prototyping pads. You can also buy an IP67 water- and dust-proof case for the Hornbill ESP32 Dev.

If you prefer, there’s the Hornbill Maker Kit which offers a mini-breadboard, a microSD breakout, an OLED display, and sensors for temperature, light, ultra-sonic distance, accelerometer/gyro, PIR motion, and temperature/humidity. The kit also includes a relay shield, resistors, headers, jumper wires, a buzzer, LEDs, and a rotary encoder.

There are also a variety of alternative Hornbill designs, like the Hornbill Minima designed for wearables that combines an ESP-WROOM32 with a LiPo plug, and requires the use of crocodile clips to access I/O.

Click here to visit the Hornbill’s Crowd Supply page and choose your favourite kit!

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