There are just three major components that we need to be concerned about within the hardware architecture:

• The MicroPython development boards
• The APDS-9960
• The LEDs

Just as in the previous projects, we can power the MicroPython board through a USB connector, at least during development. As we saw in the last lab, if you are using the STM32 IoT Discovery node with the Arduino prototyping board, there are +5V and +3V output headers. The development boards for the APDS-9960 from Adafruit and SparkFun can take 3V, so they can be powered directly from the MicroPython board. In most cases, it also makes sense to power the LEDs through +3V and then use a General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) pin to control the state or brightness through a pulse width modulation (PWM) or just an on or off switch

There are two communication interfaces that we need to concern ourselves with. The first is the communication interface between the MicroPython board and the APDS-9960. The APDS-9660 uses inter-integrated circuit (I2C), so that will be the interface that is used. The last interface is just the USB console interface, the REPL (short for Read-Eval-Print Loop), that we will use to display the gesture that was detected.

The following figure summarizes the hardware architecture for the gesture controller: