Google recently released the Coral Environmental Sensor Board ( https://blog.hackster.io/google-releases-coral-environmental-sensor-board-for-the-raspberry-pi-d63245510fbb ), a board with a light sensor, barometric pressure sensor, and humidity/temp sensor, as well as connections for UART, I2C, and PWM. Its further goal is to allow you to securely link your projects and collect, analyze, and process the sensor data using Google’s lineup of various tools. The sensors and connectors on Environmental Sensor Board are interesting but what piqued the interest for the event was Hackster’s article stating:

Google states that the board includes a single key (private, public, and certificate) that will enable communication with the Cloud IoT Core right out of the box.

I was unable to locate (and did not make any significant effort to) Google making that assertion but Google’s Getting Started guide states:

 It includes a secure cryptoprocessor with Google keys to enable connectivity with Google Cloud IoT Core services, allowing you to securely connect

By the time of this posting, I was not able to connect to IoT Core out of the box nor confirm an onboard cryptoprocessor. I was successful using the getting started guide to display sensor values locally on the Environmental Board’s OLED screen. A post on the Coral support repository outlines steps to push data from the Environmental Board to IoT Core. Note that those steps include manually creating a key pair and that the steps were based at least in part with Coral support. Also note that the Environmental Board API doesn’t reference a cryptoprocessor or secure communication. The Coral CloudIot Core API lists a publish_message method which could employ the out of the box secure communications, although the question would remain how to later ingest that published message. No response from direct email to Coral support was received by the time of this post. Unfortunately I agree with the support repository post:

the ‘getting started’ doc for this board just wasn’t deep or broad enough

For the event, we used a slightly modified blend of the IoT Core Quickstart, where attendees pushed data from the Pi to IoT core and viewed the pushed data.