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

Huh?

[JBMcB]

Little Bits:
https://littlebits.com/

Gakken EX:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Snap Circuits:
https://www.elenco.com/brand/s...

Then there are the domain specific building block electronics - Arduino shields, raspberry pi blocks, MakerBlocks, mBot modules...

And, of course, all the modules for Mindstorms, both from LEGO and third-party.

These look kind of neat, though. Price is right!

Re:Huh?

[smoot123]

Lectron. I had one of these as a kid. No where near as cool as an I2C setup.

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:Huh?

[PPH]

they require you to do a bit of soldering

Someone is going to get smart and add an option to order these with 0.1" pitch pins already attached.
So we can plug them into a plugboard, just like the old DIP packages.
SMD packaging sort of screwed up the "plug and jumper" method of prototyping.

Lego*

[Anonymous Coward]

The plural of Lego is Lego.

Re:Lego*

[theNetImp]

"every child I know".... *sigh*

Re:Lego*

[serviscope_minor]

Everyone I know pluralizes it as "lego". Having an "s" on the end makes it sound as weird as "sheeps" or "pantses".

Re:Lego*

[anarcobra]

I'm going to disagree.
Growing up I called them lego, my parent's called them lego, everyone I knew called them lego.
Legos sounds stupid, like "meccanos" or "sheeps."
That said, I don't care if other people sounds stupid, so go ahead and call them what you want.

Re:Lego*

[AmiMoJo]

Maybe some people used to play in a sands pit with their waters pistol.

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'.

Re:Lego*

[BenFenner]

According to LEGO themselves, common decency, and common English grammar.

LEGO is both singular and plural, like sheep, or sushi, or Kleenex (if you want another good brand name to compare to).

I have a pack of LEGO, that my herd of sheep carry, while I feed them sushi and hand out Kleenex. This isn't rocket surgery.

The 'dumbing down' of electronics as a hobby?

[Rick Schumann]

I'm conflicted. On the one hand, things like this (and Arduino, and RPi, and so on) make things more accessible to the 'masses' -- but on the other hand, it seems like it's 'dumbing down electronics', taking away any requirement that you actually learn how electronics works at the component level.
I can't easily count how many people (probably teenagers, really; this is the internet, who can tell?) were spending inordinate amounts of time just getting an Arduino (or similar microcontroller-based toy) to make an LED blink, or something similar, and they would talk about how they were 'doing electronics'; contradict them, and with a straight face, not kidding with you, would claim that "if it doesn't use a microcontroller, it's not electronics", and how 'analog electronics is old fashioned and obsolete, no one uses that stuff anymore'. I kid you not. Meanwhile they'd need an Instructible and a YouTube how-to video to build a basic crystal radio, and they'd be utterly clueless as to how it works -- assuming that is you could convince them that it would even work and that you weren't trying to troll them (less than half a dozen parts and no microcontroller? How does it do anything?).

Someone else mentioned 'Lectron', from back in the 1980's; my brother had some of those, although I was never allowed to mess with them. Some might argue those were on the same level as what we're discussing here, but the fact of the matter is, those were just 'sanitized' versions of discrete components, eliminating the need for soldering or any sort of solderless breadboarding, you still had to understand electronics enough to make something work.

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.