Tag: Arduino

The DuinoKits

Hobbyist Kits — Yesterday (200-in-1) and Today (DuinoKit)!

James Floyd Kelly1

I must have been around twelve years of age when I began developing an interest in electronics. I started taking electronic gizmos like alarm clocks and kitchen appliances apart (often without permission) and examining them more closely. Rather than discourage me, my parents switched gears and birthday and Christmas presents moved from toys to more fun and advanced project-like gifts. One of the more memorable ones was a 200-in-1 electronics kit from Radio Shack.

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Hacking the Holidays

Anton Olsen

One of my favorite things about the maker revolution is the availability of tools that a decade ago were out of reach of the average hobbyist. Sure, magazines like Nuts & Volts catered to the die-hard hobbyists, but before the internet, and before e-commerce it was difficult for the average guy to find the parts for their projects. It wasn’t just availability either, the price of these things was high. Development boards for microcontrollers cost upwards of $100 and more, and small parts often had a minimum order of 100 units.

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The Mothership: A Visit to the New SparkFun Building

Garth Sundem

The shipping department was full of dudes with asymmetric facial hair on skateboards. An engineer had picked up about a thousand Keva planks and on an upstairs wrap-around counter space, there was a crowdsourced build going on — in which you could tell the crowd had higher than the average bear’s level of design thinking skills. Strung on a wall was a DIY art piece made of light bulbs and wire that was set to ripple in response to sounds. A trigger-operated race car track wound underneath a 7-foot tall version of one of those wooden dinosaur skeleton kits.

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