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Air Quality Monitoring

4/28/2025

The Air Quality Monitoring project monitors the particulate matters, relative humidity, temperature, and indexes for VOC, NOx and CO2.

The project runs on the Silicon Labs EFR32xG24 Explorer Kit for low-power.
One single sensor, the Sensirion SEN66 sensing platform, provides all the measures.
The Pervasive Displays “Spectra 4” 2.66” screen displays all the values and leverages the four colours for warning and critical messages.

Discover the project.

Remote E-Paper Weather and Message Board with Arduino Cloud

2/5/2025

This project leverages the Pervasive Displays EPDK-Matter but uses instead the Arduino Nano ESP32 with WiFi connectivity.

It relies on the Arduino Cloud for both the development of the software and the management of the device.

Discover the project.

Arduino Nano Matter and Xiao MG24 with Silicon Labs MG24

1/28/2025

With the recent introduction of Silicon Labs into the Arduino world with the release of the Silicon Labs core for Arduino, two very interesting boards bring Matter to everyone.

Two boards are based on the MG24: the Arduino Nano Matter and the Seeed Xiao MG24.

How do they compare? Read the review.

Exploring Matter with the E-Paper Development Kit for Matter

12/11/2024

The Matter protocol is a new offer in the fragmented landscape of home automation. Instead of closed systems, the Matter protocol offers a unified and secure standard across all the brands, allowing the same device to join Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, or Home Assistant.

The Pervasive Displays E-Paper Development Kit for Matter (EPDK-Matter) bundles the EXT4 extension board with the Arduino Nano Matter board, powered by the Silicon Labs MGM240PA32VNA module. The EXT4 Extension board drives an e-paper display and features multiple sensors.

The PDLS_EXT4_Basic_Matter library includes two examples, a Matter weather station and a Matter-controlled RGB LED. To join the Matter network, just scan the QR-code displayed on the screen.

Read the full review.

Connecting the EXT3 to the Silicon Labs Boards

3/5/2024

Silicon Lab has recently ported its official Gecko-SDK, or GSDK, to the Arduino SDK.

The xG24 Explorer Kit board features a Cortex-M33 with enough Flash and RAM to support large e-paper displays.

Discover how to connect the xG24 Explorer Kit to the EXT3-1 board.

New four colours black-white-red-yellow screens from Pervasive Displays

9/20/2023

After the monochrome black and white and the colour screens with red, Pervasive Displays has launched new e-paper screens featuring four colours black-white-red-yellow.

The screens are fully compatible with previous hardware and software, and ideally suited for incremental levels of messages (information, warning, alert) and high-impact messages.

Read the review.

Evaluating Python with the Pervasive Displays E-Paper Display Pico Kit Touch

3/2/2023

With all the fanfare about Python on microcontrollers, I wanted to investigate.

I used the EPDK-271-Touch kit from Pervasive Displays which includes a 2.71" e-paper screen with capacitive touch and a Raspberry Pi Pico. Later on, I also tried against the Raspberry Pi Model 4B and found unexpected results.

Read the review.

Pervasive Displays E-Paper Display Pico Kit Touch

3/2/2023

After the very popular Pervasive Displays E-Paper Display Pico Kit (or EPDK), Pervasive Displays adds touch with the new E-Paper Display Pico Kit Touch.

On the software side, the Pervasive Displays Library Suite has been updated for Arduino with a GUI library. A new Python edition is now available and targets the Raspberry Pi Pico and the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and Model 4B.

Read the review.

Node-RED now running on MCUs

1/12/2023

Back in March 2020, I asked whether Node-RED could generate code for MCUs. Today, the answer is yes.

Thanks to the Moddable SDK and the Node-RED MCU plug-in, GPIO management, MQTT messages and even dashboards run on a board powered by an MCU.

Read the review.

Energia and the LaunchPad Platform Turn Legacy

9/29/2022

The last release of Energia, the fork of the Arduino IDE and SDK for the LaunchPad boards, was numbered 1.8.10E23 and published in December 2019. This project seems to no longer be maintained.

The official tools from Texas Instruments are Code Composer Studio, based on Eclipse with an online variant. Each wired and wireless micro-controller family has its dedicated SDK. However, those tools are far from easy to use and may not appeal to non-professionals.

As a consequence, the LaunchPad platform and BoosterPack extensions turn legacy.

This is really unfortunate: the LaunchPad MSP432 brought RTOS for everyone with the Galaxia library; the sub-1 GHz CC1352 provided an excellent radio with ultra-low-power performance.