When I first saw the LinkIt ONE at Mediatek’s stand at the Web Summit it was being shown of with a bunch of neat modular peripherals. The person on the stand had no idea about them, and couldn’t explain why the board had its own connectors for these modules. It didn’t take much sleuthing to discover that the modular system was Seeed Studio’s Grove system[1], and I ordered myself a Grove Starter Kit (for Arduino[2])

The kit comes with a bunch of sensors and actuators. It’s much like what can be found in an Arduino starter kit like the ARDX, but the key is that everything is connected together with the same 4 wire leads rather than having to plug individual components and wires into breadboard.

The simplicity of connection makes prototyping much quicker and easier, so I think the Grove kit does a good job of making Arduino development more interesting and accessible. I’m also pleased to say that the hardware is backed up by decent libraries and demos (licensed with LGPL).

Notes

[1] Mediatek partnered with Seeed to create and distribute the LinkIt ONE.
[2] They also do starter kits for the LinkIt ONE, TI Launchpad and a variety of other dev boards.