Does it make me a geek because I get excited by lighting an LED on an eval board? Okay, maybe it does, but I’m guessing that I’m far from alone in that camp. But obviously it’s not the blinking light that’s exciting. It’s the meaning behind the lit LED – that I’ve made a Wi-Fi connection between the GT202 evaluation board and the other devices in my office.

The kit came from Qualcomm, and it contains the company’s Atheros QCA4002 802.11 b/g/n device that’s optimized for low power. A second board contains a Freescale 32-bit Cortex-M0 microprocessor. The two modules snap together. The USB cable lets you connect to a host device for power. The kit is aimed at Qualcomm’s Internet of Everything initiative.

The quick-start guide that came with the kit was relatively easy to follow. I downloaded the drivers, ran a few files, and voila, connections and blinking LEDs. It’s the little things in life, right?

Clearly, this kit can be used for far more things than just connecting and blinking, but that was enough to serve my purposes. I can see how it would help a designer get started on his low-power Wi-Fi design. Full Internet connectivity is easily obtained with a high level of security. In addition, a UART-based host interface can be used for quicker development and deployment of simple data streams between the local device and the Internet cloud. A SPI slave interface is available for applications that require more advanced network connectivity.