You want to make something new. You want to control it from your phone, but you donโ€™t want to code a phone app from scratch. And it would be nice if there was a cheap option to do all that. There is: The SparkFun Blynk Board.

Blynk is a service to make coding smartphone-controlled gizmos easy. They have a drag & drop editor to make your own apps that you can use straight from your smartphone. If you invent something youโ€™d like to sell, theyโ€™d be happy to whitelabel it for you: You can put your own name on it, and sell it.

SparkFun put a board together with everything you need to get started with Blynk. Itโ€™s built around the cult-favorite ESP8266 chip, a low-cost microcontroller with built-in Wi-Fi. They built it with big, alligator-clip friendly pads to quickly wire it up to whatever. They threw an RGB LED on the board, and a button, so you can get started trying out Blynk without even needing to wire anything in. Lastly, they threw in a card with Blynk service credit; enough to run a simple device indefinitely.

blynk board