Nicely done. The whole Lego thing is pretty powerful. Even Lego thought so and the whole "mindstorms" product line came from that.
However, the really cool stuff as far as I'm concerned is the nylon conductive tape. That is super useful for things like making electrically active textiles and putting circuits into odd places. One ohm per foot isn't too shabby. I ordered a bunch of rolls of that (to make shipping reasonable) and I'm really interested to play around with it.
You might also be interested in some of the work that bunnie has done with paper, copper tape, binder clips, and various components in this blog post[1] and also with Chibitronics[2]. That having been said, I'm glad they mention why they didn't use copper tape here before I tried to stick any down on a Lego plate!
I'm always skeptical of these 'no solder circuits for kids' systems you see everywhere but building them into the LEGO standard is a refreshingly good idea.
I'm not sure why Lego themselves didn't make Lego-based breadboards. Seems like a fairly straightforward idea.
Flat breadboard with conductive "lanes". Bricks with electric parts. Flat pieces with conductors. Conductivity in bricks would normally go from top to bottom, so you could easily stack things or connect them from the top side, without adding stuff to breadboard.
Would be great even for "adult" prototyping. No more wire spaghetti or bent pins.
Bonus points for "empty" bricks you could solder your own parts into. You do it once and get a reusable part.
They've had drag-and-drop programmable controllers for at least 18 years, along with electrical bricks with motors, batteries, speed controllers, lights, light detectors, touch sensors, etc. Lego mindstorms.
I'd love to see how expressive they are. Many times, these kits are really good at building exactly what's in the directions, and not much else. Would love to see some blogger or other independent to get a kit and play around. Contrasting it to LittleBits and Mindstorm would be useful.
That said, this isn't the first time i've seen this company. They had a few other kits that were interesting and I almost bought them but my kids are a bit too young. I hope they continue to grow and are around in a few years.
I think a modern update with microcontroller/digital-microelectronics would be awesome.
I really wonder why this hasn't been mashed with the Maker/rPi crowd, and we don't have Denshi blocks for the kids these days. Seems like a no-brainer ..
Yeah, I was soldering little kits at a pretty young age. With proper supervision it feels you might as well have the kid really go for it, or have them direct the parent and lead them through the soldering process, while the parent performs the actual connection, showing proper technique and safety, including ventilation etc.
Soldering would make the toy permanent into whatever configuration it was soldered into. This allows for undoing, redoing, rinse, lather, repeat. That's what makes it fun. You do it once and use solder, you learn that you can follow directions and work a soldering iron. These type of "toys" can lead to experimenting by undoing, and then connecting to something else.
I can't see when I'd find an hour or two undisturbed to learn to solder! And it's not something you want to be doing with younger kids around necessarily - even though the older of your children might be old enough to learn to solder, you may still be looking after younger children. Even with something as simple as getting out all the painting stuff, I have to be the right frame of mind to be able to cope with the chaos and mess!
If you really want to learn digital electronics you should learn how to design a very simple CPU from scratch. If you can do that then you can build virtually any digital circuit you can think of. And it is not that hard (although it will take some dedication, months of reading and experimenting) Plenty of resources out there that teach you how to do it from scratch.
When I was a kid I tried to learn electronics by buying these types of kits. They were totally useless, complete waste of money and they only accomplished in making me feel that electronics was way too hard for me. All I could do was assemble the circuits in the diagrams but there was no understanding involved.
The worst part was that they all used some computers chips, like the 555 timer, to do some special effects, etc. When you are starting out any chip is kind of useless in your goal to understanding digital electronics.
This seems the wrong way up to me, in that a CPU from scratch seems like a much harder thing to achieve and learn from. But I'll agree that the "analogue" build a circuit stuff is very different to the digital stuff.
I don't know. But digital design concepts are not that difficult. I don't think there really is a minimum age. Digital design can be taught as a game of building puzzles. Almost like legos. A young kid should be able to pick the basic concepts, I think. You could treat each of the gates as a lego block and go from there.
I think that if you can teach a young kid programming concepts then you should definitely be able to teach them digital design concepts.
In Ben Eater's breadboard-computer videos https://eater.net/8bit he recommends Digital Computer Electronics by Malvino and Brown. (I haven't read it yet myself.)
This is very cool and looks like a lot of fun. The price not so much however. Where does a $200 price tag come from for a pack of parts that should go for around $10-20? Are the PCBs so expensive to create?
The creators of this should consider something like massdrop.com to see if they can generate sufficient interest to get the prices within a reasonable range. The "Crazy Circuits Makerspace Set"[0] is just about an order of magnitude more costly than I would consider "cheap" for such a kit.
That said, as someone who had a lot of fun with Snapcircuits as a child, I agree that this would have been a great way to transition from something that is essentially a "toy" to full blown bread-board tinkering.
Keep in mind the Makerspace kit is ostensibly aimed at arming a whole classroom or workshop full of people, though it looks a little light to me in major components for that. However, it's not meant to be a personal starter kit.
Ostensibly, it's a place where multiple people sign up to buy something, so that you get bulk prices. In my experience it's been much more about trying to get you to buy for the same or more than you can get on Amazon using 'limited time' artificial scarcity.
Hi there! I'm one of the creators of Crazy Circuits. Price is always a big issue for us as a company and I'm always happy to explain things for people.
First off the PCBs are not at all expensive to get in bulk. But then there's the pick and place cost, parts cost, shipping from China (we used to do it in the US, but that got really expensive), and now tariffs. We also can't use the cheapest PCB producers as we have LEGO tolerances to deal with. Keep in mind that buying in bulk also means a large, up front cost as well. Or original kickstarter brought in over $50,000... but we spent over $80,000 doing our first batch of parts and supplies.
The big issue is overhead and resellers. We have employees to pay, rent to cover, and events to go to. Those add up. While we really strive to make our kits as affordable as possible we need money to grow and provide support. Graphic Designer, Curriculum writer, warehouse workers, customer support, PCB designers. A lot of different employees and outside contractors helped launch Crazy Circuits, and most of them are still working on new projects.
We also have to price things accordingly in order to sell through resellers. Teaching and library catalogues, Amazon, STEM supply websites. They all need to take their cut. Again, if we want to scale we need to get our products out there and in front of a lot of eyes. Figure that on average these places need a 40-50% discount off retail pricing. Then we still need to make money somewhere. This makes for some thin margins on a few kits.
We do a very bare minimum mark up on our parts and kits. If you compare our $100 or $200 kits to similarly priced STEM products we tend to give a lot more parts per dollar (Or compare our $1,000 Maker Space Kit to something like Littlebits or Circuit Scribe, and you'll see how fast educational products get expensive). Yes, you could just buy raw parts and throw them on a breadboard for $20, but that ignores what makes our kits fun.
We're trying to be a nice middle ground between a standard breadboard and something like snap circuits or (god forbid) Littlebits. Something that both beginner kids and adults can have fun with as either an electronics kit or a LEGO kit.
I hope I was able to answer a few questions for everyone about how pricing works. It's been a major thorn in our side since we started this business, but we do what we can to keep prices down.
Breadboards hide the connections and require a significant amount of thinking in transforming to and from a circuit diagram. This isn't hard once you've mastered it, but I can understand wanting to ease K-12 classrooms into it.
Yeah. Connections on heavily-used breadboards can also become very iffy, which is somewhat demoralising: you assemble a circuit on the breadboard and it just flat out doesn't work, or perhaps it works for a bit then dies.
While it seems to be a bit of a dead technology now, something like wirewrap would be a much better way to translate directly from diagram to board.
However, the really cool stuff as far as I'm concerned is the nylon conductive tape. That is super useful for things like making electrically active textiles and putting circuits into odd places. One ohm per foot isn't too shabby. I ordered a bunch of rolls of that (to make shipping reasonable) and I'm really interested to play around with it.