What If Your Electronic Parts Were More Like Legos? (electricdollarstore.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader beckman101 writes: This week Electric Dollar Store opened its doors, selling interchangeable postage-stamp sized I2C-based modules for prices between $1.00 and $1.80. The modules include lights, buzzers, counters and sensors — the range is aimed at electronic makers. These aren't manufacturing rejects shipping from Asia — they're assembled, tested and shipped from a small farming town in California, where winter labor is cheap.

All the code for the project is BSD licensed.

The project is a spin-off from the popular open-source I2CDriver hardware debugger.

Comments

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

littleBits is a neat idea ruined by pricing. ( https://shop.littlebits.com/collections/bits ) $10 for an LED? $10 for an AND gate? $12 to split your wire? $12 for a buzzer?

The pricing of these $1 to $2 parts seem more inline with reality, though they don't have many parts available, and they've made them so you need to solder them rather than making them easily snap together. They may be a bit easier to use than a plain chip, led, or pot, having a standard pin-out, and a flat board to sit on, but you, or your kids school, aren't going to let young kids handle a soldering iron.

What the world needs, for education purposes, is something like littleBits (for part variety, and which can snap together), but priced like this (so you can build something without winning a lottery), and which can connect easily to a Pi, or ODroid, or Arduino (for when you want complexity that a CPU can deal with), and ideally parts would be available in 3.3 or 5v, or simply work for both.

Re:Lego*

[TechyImmigrant]

The plural of Lego is Lego.

According to whom?

I've always used "legos" as the plural, e.g. when telling my kids to put them away.

This behaviour seems limited to the USA. Lego the corporation wants you to protect their brand for them by calling them 'Lego brand building blocks' but everyone else in the English speaking world, outside the US calls many lego 'lego'. In Denmark the plural form is noun-er, but for lego they call it it 'lego'.

Parts are cheap but imagination is hard

[Slugster]

The problem today with having digital electronics as a hobby is not hardware-related, it's simply thinking up useful things to do. How many times have you seen someone ask "I got this Arduino/Rasberry Pi (as a gift, in a contest, some other way), what can I do with it?"... If you can buy from China sources, the prices of most common components is very very inexpensive. Chinese Arduino clones cost $2-$3, and for just a few dollars more you can get boards with other processors that are much faster and have more memory--assuming you write a program that needs either of those things. Display screens cost $3, basic GPS chips cost $1, various wifi/wireless chips cost $3, CCD cameras cost $3, laser rangefinders cost $8, a cell phone radio (requires a SIM) costs $8.

I do think that the main reason for the popularity of Arduino is that both the hardware and the software were made specifically to be easy to use.
Interest/sales of a given processor or IC tend to pick up a lot after there is an Arduino IDE board definition or library for it.
I suspect that people assume that if they cannot get the "professional" dev environment to work, they assume they can still get it to work in the Arduino IDE.