Hexiwear Docking Station

Now is the time for an important note: although Hexiwear supports over-the-air programming (OTAP), doing so takes about 10 minutes per upload, making it rather unsuitable for development work. This is where the Hexiwear Docking Station comes in. Besides three mikroBus slots, an SD card socket, an I2S interface (I2C is found on the mikroBus slots), and some LEDs and pushbuttons, the docking station also has an OpenSDA serial and debug adapter through which you can quickly reprogram one of the two microcontrollers and that allows you to debug your code.

The docking station also transforms the Hexiwear into an mbed-compatible device compatible with drag-n-drop programming. Plug the Hexiwear on the docking station, connect the docking station to the computer, switch the docking station on!, and double-click the MBED.HTM file on the flash drive that will open. This will take you to the mbed website and, once logged in, you can start coding right away. Nothing to install at all, not even a serial port driver.

Besides detailed information about the module and the docking station hardware, this is also a good place to look for sample programs and firmware updates.

mikroBus

As mentioned above, the docking station features three mikroBus slots. For those new to the concept, mikroBus is the expansion bus standard by MikroElektronika and for which they have developed 200 or more so-called Click boards. A Click board is a small module with a dedicated function, mostly sensor functions, but there are also displays, motor controllers and wireless modules for almost every technology you can think of. Given the number of Click boards, you will be hard pressed not to find one that corresponds to the function you need.

Conclusion

Looking at the quality of the kit, its capabilities and the amount of documentation and support available for it online, it is no wonder that users like their Hexiwear. If this development platform doesn’t become hugely successful, then the only explanation possible is that IoT and smart watches are merely hyped-up concepts that end users don’t care about.