In order to design successful Internet of Things (IoT) networks, prototyping and simulation are complementary techniques. This requires that the prototypes have enough hardware resources to run the entire IoT stack. Moreover, the simulators must be fine-tunable to accurately behave like the simulated network components at all the levels of the stack. Both must have facilities for measuring and reporting performance indices without significantly perturbing normal operation. This paper describes dual motes used as hardware building blocks to build prototype networks. They fulfill the enounced requirements and allow the experimental determination of the parameters necessary for extending the study of a prototype network by means of simulations.