Espressif is delighted to announce a new collaboration with Gigabits, aimed at significantly improving our customers’ user experience. The Gigabits IoT Platform is a real-world IoT Sandbox for enterprises, developers, and makers looking to explore IoT use cases and application spaces. The platform enables users to rapidly deploy, monitor, control, and generate data from Internet-enabled devices (micro-controllers, sensors, actuators, appliances, etc.), and quickly get insights into the data they generate through data visualization tools. The platform supports two classes of users: enterprise developers and makers. Support for developers includes small scale proof-of-concept deployments as well as full-scale production deployments of devices. This way, developers can test-drive their initial ideas and formulate solid IoT strategies before making scale-up investments. Makers are supported with traditional low-cost breadboard designs as well.

Rather than dealing with hardware, Gigabits is focused exclusively on the cloud components of the IoT platform. Gigabits aims to enable any micro-controller to seamlessly connect to the Gigabits cloud, making it easy for developers and makers to harness the extreme value derived from cloud connectivity and control. Gigabits has built connector libraries for Espressif and other micro-controllers.

The Gigabits ESP32 Modular Project Kit includes an ESP32 for the purpose of controlling sensors and actuators from NCD (National Control Devices), which is an electronics manufacturer on the cutting edge of the IoT industry, focused on interfacing the analog world with digital electronics. Gigabits also offers the breadboard-based ESP32 Maker Project kit. This way, when ESP32 users connect their device to the Gigabits cloud platform, the user experience will improve quickly and dramatically. Instead of being limited to connecting and experimenting on a local machine, once the device is connected to the Gigabits cloud platform, users will have a plethora of options from which to enhance the experience, e.g. visualization tools, telemetry and control, data storage, and data analytics. Additionally, machine learning tools will be offered from Q3 in 2020 onward.

The Gigabits Dashboard

The ESP32 Modular Project Kit from Gigabits simplifies the provisioning of developers’ test environment by integrating high quality hardware (sensors and actuators) from NCD with Gigabits’ platform and visualization tools. More specifically, the ESP32 Modular Project Kit includes:

• 1. An Espressif ESP32 Micro-controller  
  2. Gigabits' ESP32 Connector Framework
  3. NCD IoT Training Board (with I2C Interface, Temperature and Humidity Sensor, Pressure Sensor, PWM Controller for On-Board Buzzer, RGB LEDs, DC Motor Speed Control, Servo Motor Position Control, GPIO Controller)
  4. NCD Gas Sensor Module
  5. NCD Light Sensor Module
  6. NCD Proximity Sensor Module
  7. NCD Hygrometer Module

The ESP32 Modular Project Kit

Another demo kit called the ESP32 Maker Project is a low cost, breadboard-based kit featuring an ESP32.  To provide examples, this demo kit has generic soil, humidity, temperature, gas and visible light sensors.  Many other sensors and actuators can be used as well.

 The ESP32 Maker Project Kit

ESP32 users can register here to see if they can qualify for a test drive via the Gigabits Beta Testing Program. Additionally, they can get the ESP32 Modular Project Instructions here and the ESP32 Maker Project Instructions here. The examples demonstrate two ways to connect ESP32-based projects to the Gigabits platform.