Simba-Pro review

By Ben Everard. Posted about 6 years ago.

The Simba-Pro IoT module is a Bluetooth dev board built on an ARM Cortex-M4, with a whole lot of extra features. There are position sensors (accelerometer, gyro, magnetometer), environment sensors (temperature, humidity, pressure, light, microphone), and ways of interacting with the user, including a button and a red-green LED. You can also add onto this with a wide range of expansions via the GPIO pins that support I2C, SPI, CAN, UART, and PWM. This is all packed into a board smaller than an SD card.

There’s obviously a lot on this board, and you could do a lot of projects without needing any expansions. In these cases, the tiny size and light weight are a huge advantage. The more you have to add on to this core, the more you lose the key advantage of its size.

There’s a bundle of software for working with it, including the usual Arduino IDE board definition. Particularly intriguingly, there are frameworks for Android and iOS software that can work with it reading the sensor data. For software devs who don’t want to get dirty in hardware, this provides an easy introduction to building software which interfaces more with the real world. It would, for example, allow you to build a Wii Nunchuk-style input device without having to get out your soldering iron or breadboard. There’s a sample application that you can run without even touching the hardware – just power it up and you can get the info you need off the device.

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While the documentation for the project isn’t awful, neither is it great. The information you need is likely to be on the website, but it won’t necessarily be easy to find or understand, especially if you’re new to embedded hardware development. This is a slightly unusual situation: it’s an interesting option for real beginners because you can do so much without having to worry about the hardware, but it’s not a great option for intermediate users because once you do have to start worrying about the hardware, it’s not as simple as many other options.

The more you need to add to it, the more you’re likely to get bogged down by the documentation and relatively small community of hobbyist developers on this platform. For advanced users, the advantages kick in again – provided you don’t need to add too much to it, it’s still small, low power, and quick to get started with.

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