I came across this kite recently:

Smart Solar Tracker System Tracking Starter Kit or Arduino

Which I thought would be a good opportunity to jump back into things after all teh struggles I’ve had with the Arducam Mega 3MP. I need a few wins to lift my motivation, thus the purchase.

The brains of the kit is a Keyestudio KS0172:

The core processor of this board is ATMEGA328P-AU and ATMEGA16U2 is used as a UART-to-USB conversion chip.

It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a powerjack, 1 ICSP header, and a reset button. All you need to do is connect it to a computer via a USB cable and power it with an external power supply of DC 7-12V

Which seems much easier to interface.

Turns out this kit is actually a series of projects with the board, which is exactly what I wanted. Start simple and then extend.

First step was to get the board working with Platformio environment.

When I plugged the board into my PC it was automatically recognised as Arduino Uno as see above. Thus, when I set up Platformio I select Arduino Uno. This produced the following platformio.ini for me:

[env:uno]
platform = atmelavr
board = uno
framework = arduino

I then wired up the LED board per the instructions in the manual like so:

and uploaded the following code to the board:

https://github.com/directorcia/Azure/blob/master/Iot/Keyestudio%20KS0172/Lesson_1.1/main.cpp

The only change I needed to make to the code that came with the kit was to add:

#include <arduino.h>

to the top.

and I am very happy to report that it all worked as expected upon uploading the code to the boardand seen above.

Now onto the next project in the kit.