DjsBlog: Wilderness Labs -About Project Lab V3

Wilderness Labs Project Lab 3 is an embedded board based upon the Meadow F7 Core Compute module. It comes with .Net installed and numerous onboard sensors etc, including a 2.8” 320x240 pixel TFT LCD display with 65k colors as well as 4 (direction) buttons. There is a rich tapestry of off-the-shelf drivers for onboard hardware and for numerous other plug-able devices. There are Core drivers. It also comes with drivers for peripherals connected by Grove Analog and Serial sockets as well as a qwiic socket. Also for peripheral connectivity it comes with 2 mikroBUS sockets. WiFi and BlueTooth are both included.

The WILDERNESS LABS Project Lab V3 board

About

The Project Lab 3 is one of a number of offerings from WildernessLabs. It is based upon the Meadow F7v2 Core-Compute Module which is available for use in system productions. That module is also available as a developer format,Meadow F7v2 Core-Compute Dev Kit, without the ProjLab3 peripherals. There is also the base developer version, the Meadow F7v2 Feather.

Djz Project Labs V3 GitHub Repositories

Project Labs V3 Specifications

The Project Labs V3 MCU is a STM32F7 which is an ARM Cortex-M7 core with 2MB internal Flash memory and 412Kb internal RAM. The board has external onboard 64MB of Flash and 32MB e QSPI RAM. It has a ESP32 coprocessor providing WiFi and Bluetooth.

Onboard sensors include an accelerometer, a gyroscope an environment sensor and a light sensor. (See Link 1. above) Many more are supported that can be plugged into the board. The drivers for these are Open Source through the Meadow Foundation. Further, this link contains a link to the Base, FeatherWings, Grove and mikroBus driver and demo Meadow.Foundation repositories.

GPIO The Grove connectors can provide GPIO connectivity for Grove connected peripherals such as switches, rotary devices and LEDs. The mikroBUS sockets will also accept jumpers like a breadboard for connectivity to digital devices (as well as RS232, as well I2C/SPI connected devices).

In development phase, connection is via a USB-C connector which both powers the device and uploads/downloads developmental data from Visual Studio or VS Code etc. Alternatively, it can directly powered through screw terminals.

The device comes with an updatable OS (not Linux etc though). Apps for the device are built using a custom Meadow SDK targeting .Net Standard2. The device comes with a demo app installed which demonstrates the use of a number of features of it:

(Note: External link)
This and other Project Labs demos can be accessed from Meadow ProjectLab Samples.

The Software Stack

The Meadow Stack

It is worth noting that whilst apps are built with .Net Standard, so are the peripheral device drivers!

Demos

As previously mentioned, there are Project Labs device specific demos at Meadow ProjectLab Samples. These demonstrate the use of the hardware included with the Project Labs device such as the buttons, display, BME688 ambient sensor, accelerometer as well as some samples demonstrating the use of Grove connected peripherals. Amongst these samples is one for sending telemetry to an Azure IoT Hub using AMQP as well as another that controls a motor via an IoT Hub using direct methods over AMQP. MQTTnet for Azure IoT Hub Apps demonstrates using MQTT to send telemetry to an IoT Hub and to receive Cloud to Device messages. The Meadow.ProjectLab.Extensions adds a few more samples for the Project Labs device.

Meadow Foundation is made up of a number of libraries. There is the Core, Peripherals as well as Libraries and Frameworks. The Meadow.Foundation.Core drivers is a suite of drivers and samples for analog, digital, serial, PWM, I2C, networking, as well as OS specific things such as MCU temperature, battery and power monitoring and threading etc. The Meadow Core Samples is a set of sample apps using those drivers. The Meadow.Foundation.Peripherals are more complex devices such as displays, motor controllers, atmosphere sensors, motion sensors, Rfid etc. These each come with a sample app. The sample apps for these 3 repositories may need changes to the designated pins with the Project Labs device as its included hardware may be tied to pins used in those sample. Simple to change though. Meadow Foundation also has drivers for Grove and mikroBUS devices which also come with sample apps. All of the Meadow Foundation drivers are Open Source and are written in C#. Contributions are invited.

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