The SensorTile box is a small battery-powered box packed with sensors from ST Microelectronics and that communicates over Bluetooth. The ST BLE Sensor app on your smartphone lets you control the box and display the data captured by the box. The device, or should we say instrument, can also work stand-alone, without a smartphone.

SensorTile box Bundle

The accompanying book by Dogan Ibrahim provides a detailed explanation for the three operating modes of the device: Basic, Expert and Pro. The first chapters explain the Basic and Expert modes, which are easy to use. Beginning at Chapter 5 things become more complex when the book starts covering advanced subjects like connecting the device to the Cloud or to an MQTT broker. Chapter 6 deals with Pro mode, which is mainly for embedded-software developers. This is not really a mode of the box, it is just you creating applications for the SensorTile.box from scratch.

Inside the small box is a circuit board (STEVAL-MKSBOX1V1) based on an STM32L4R9 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. This is a pretty powerful device with DSP and a floating-point unit.

The sensor box contains the following sensors, all from, of course, from STMicroelectronics:
  • Digital temperature sensor (STTS751)
  • Humidity sensor (HTS221 )
  • Altimeter/pressure sensor (LPS22HH)
  • 6-axis inertial measurement unit (LSM6DSOX)
  • Two 3-axis accelerometers (LIS2DW12 and LIS3DHH)
  • 3-axis magnetometer (LIS2MDL)
  • Microphone / audio sensor (MP23ABS1)

In this video we have a go at the Sensor Tile box and try it out on a hoverboard.
 
 

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