The folks at Seeed Studio were kind enough to send me a Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino for review. That’s a mouthful of a name for a compact little kit! The Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino (henceforth “the Kit”, because ain’t nobody got time to type that out more than a few times in a single article) is about 8.5 x 5 x 1 inches. Closed, you could fit two of them on a piece of 8.

The folks at Seeed Studio have just released the Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino, and they asked if I would be willing to take a look at it in exchange for a free kit. At first glance it reminds me of the Radio Shack (remember when they were cool?) electronics kit I had when I was a kid – but somewhat more advanced. I’m excited to take a closer look, but given shipping these days means it’s probably a month away at least.

We’re all looking for ways to keep ourselves occupied these days, and for me that means leaping at the chance to turn a small problem into a slightly ridiculous electronics project. For reasons that I won’t go into here I wanted to generate an alert when a certain WiFi BSSID becomes visible. A simple solution to this problem would have been a few lines of shell script to send me an email…but this article isn’t about simple solutions!

I have a Raspberry Pi running RetroPie hooked up to a television. It’s powered from a USB port on the TV, which is convenient, but it means that whenever we shut off the TV we’re pulling the plug on the Pi. While there haven’t been any problems so far, this is a classic recipe for filesystem problems or data loss at some point. I started looking into UPS options to alleviate this issue.

I’ve set up my Raspberry Pi to communicate with my Arduino via I2C. The Raspberry Pi is a 3.3v device and the Arduino is a 5v device. While in general this means that you need to use a level converter when connecting the two devices, you don’t need to use a level converter when connecting the Arduino to the Raspberry Pi via I2C. The design of the I2C bus is such that the only device driving a voltage on the bus is the master (in this case, the Raspberry Pi), via pull-up resistors.