The evive aims to reduce the complex tangles of sensors, circuit boards and cables you have covering your workbench. It’s a compact, all-in-one small book-sized device capable of reading and outputting a variety of sensor and trigger data. Built in includes power sensors, multiple motor channels, voltmeter probes, and two analog to digital converters. If that’s not enough for you, at the heart of the evive is an Arduino Mega offering large expansion possibilities with a mini breadboard, communication module (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and XBee), IC, SPI and Serial pins.
You can interact with all these data points via the on-board switches, potentiometers and on-screen interface. This interface has a default set of options and methods for interacting with the hardware, but you can customize by uploading your own code.
Made to Measure
As one quick example, whilst using the in-built battery, the voltage fluctuates slightly. Too see how much, I fired up the in-built oscilloscope, increased the resolution, and voila an instant chart.
I remember playing with my Grandad’s old voltmeter when I was a child, sticking the probes into things to see what charge they held. Now I can do the same with the evive. Here’s me reading the charge of a rechargeable battery in my wireless mouse:
If you’re into hardware projects I think you get the idea and the potential of how the evive works, and how useful it could be to your projects, but one of its unique features is the ability to upload custom menus and functionality.
Build Your Own
This involves firing up the official Arduino IDE, and ensuring that you select the evive from the Tools -> Board and Tools -> Port menu items, it will appear as ‘Arduino/Genuino Mega or Mega 2560’. The evive team have a lot of examples available here that you can paste into the IDE code window and upload to the unit. Make sure you have installed any libraries they use from the Sketch -> Include Library menu item.
Here’s the evive running the alarm clock example:
To restore the default menu system, download it from the evive GitHub here, make sure it’s included in your local Arduino libraries folder and upload the contents of evive.info to the unit.
Great! And as you’ve seen all the code for the evive is open source and customizable to your heart’s content, the default software is easily changed to suit your project.
The evive team were nice enough to send a test unit over to me from India, and if you like the sound of the project then they are currently hoping to meet a $30,000 goal on Indiegogo campaign, as an essential part of your hardware project prototyping I hope you feel it’s worth a few $s.
Chris WardDeveloper Relations, Technical Writing and Editing, (Board) Game Design, Education, Explanation and always more to come. English/Australian living in Berlin, Herzlich Willkommen!
