M5Stack Dial: finding a useful IoT side quest
An upcoming hardware/software experiment around the M5Stack Dial — interface ideas, local integrations and whatever proves interesting once it is on the desk.
Connecting physical hardware with the software I write always amazed me. Having the option to use hardware interfaces other than the normal mouse and keyboard sparks some joy in me!
But as I am the software guy I needed some ready to use hardware, so I searched for it online and I found the M5STACK Dial. It has everything a developer can ask for: touchscreen, a rotary dial, RFC reader, WLAN, BLE and so on.
So I ordered one with some rough ideas in mind what to do with it. As with everything new: the ideas vary between large scale applications and small prototypes.
Current status
The dial arrived today and I quickly connected it to my computer. The preinstalled demos are already really awesome. You can play around with the differend interfaces the Dial offers.
And I have to admit: the display is surprisingly good!
So currently I am playing around with the hardware and try to get my local development setup running. Because as it turns out: developing for a piece of hardware is something else than developing a Spring Boot backend!
What happens next
I want to bootstrap my local development setup so I can quickly jump into the actual coding. After some research I quickly got in some rabbit hole of plugins, frameworks and a lot of buzzwords I’m not familiar with.
But that’s perfect! I will try to get my IDE set up and my goal is to display my Labs logo on the dial and maybe have some form of interaction with the rotary dial.