I look for hardware using the following criteria:
- Supported communication [GPIO, SPI, UART, I2C]
- Specifications for sending/receiving data (decipher a lot of docs in a Chinese dialect)
- Power requirements (can I power off the GPIO or do I need a barrel jack + power brick)
- Digital vs Analog (do I need an MCP3008 chip)
Communication links
https://github.com/nerves-project/nerves_uart
https://github.com/fhunleth/elixir_ale
Places to buy (off the top of my head)
Adafruit
SparkFun
Alibaba
