Pion One

No, I’d not heard of it either but I recently received a parcel in the post with a new ESP8266-based board – and a bunch of modules.  The description on the box says “Iot, CLoud Supported, Plug  & Play Modules, Android App, No Hardware Programming Requirement, API supported”.

And with that – here’s the board. Measuring around 50mm * 45mm it’s a bit bigger than most of the ESP boards out there – but then it has all the connectors ready to go. The company do a range of plugins – everything from the DHT22 modules (so you get the DHT22 on a board with a lead that just plugs into the Pion 1), a relay board, reed switch, moisture detector, gas detector, servo motor, button, moisture detector… I’ve also included at the bottom a pic with all the modules I have.

And it’s all decent quality stuff – I was about to laugh at the moisture sensor after my previous attempts at plant watering as the solder-based prongs don’t last a week – but these are gold-plated (that’s not very clear in the picture).

So basically if you’re a little hardware-averse – you just plug stuff in and go.

Now- the box does mention and Android App, unfortunately there was absolutely NO documentation with the board, so I went off to their website iot.seeed.cc – and…. ended up with an Apache2 default page. Oh, dear….

I did however have more luck with https://github.com/yexiaobo-seeedstudio/Pion-Docs  which has a load of documentation.   The only problem with THAT is that it tends occasionally to feature the odd Chinese character!  Anyway, within there is an English document file – and recommendations to go get the PION ONE app for Android.

Nothing. And no screen shots  so clearly this is all new and preliminary – when the APP shows up I’ll be sure to give you an update – and I’m just going to point the SEEED people to the blog so they can comment.