DuinoKit Helps Teach Students About Electronics (Video) 61
This is something Timothy Lord ran across a few months ago at a Maker Faire near Atlanta: The DuinoKit. Think of it as a fancier (and pricier) version of the venerable Radio Shack Electronic Learning Labs and you won't be far off. Plus, as the name DuinoKit implies, it's based on an Arduino, which means that right off the bat it packs a lot more learning punch than the Radio Shack kit. DuinoKit was financed by a KickStarter campaign that asked for $19,500 and raised $57,478 from 250 backers. And for those of you who worry about being called nerds because you're carrying a DuinoKit around, you can relax. It comes in a 'Secret Agent Carrying Case.' Really. Read their What is the DuinoKit? Web page carefully and you'll see. (Alternate Video Link)
No... (Score:3, Insightful)
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That's not electronics either. Electronics is about physics, you'd like to play with a vacuum tube to actually see a hot cathode and measure currents.
Re:No... (Score:5, Funny)
You're both wrong, real electronics is rubbing a cat against a glass rod.
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We used to dream about having a cat.... we had to make do with a wadded-up dustball. But it were a cat to us.
Re:No... (Score:4, Funny)
A dustball? Luxury! We had to scrape our skin with Brillo pads for a week to collect enough dust for a whole ball.
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Oh, on that note, are the Lewin OCW lectures still not reinstated?
Electricity versus electronics (Score:2)
That's not electronics either. Electronics is about physics, you'd like to play with a vacuum tube to actually see a hot cathode and measure currents.
Everything descends from [the physics concept] power.
Electricity is moving power from place to place (using electrons, to distinguish it from steam engines, plumbing &c).
Electronics is adding power to signal (again, using electrons to distinguish it from other forms such as hydraulics and pneumatcs).
Calculating the maximum load on your 15 amp circuit is electricity. Most of the wiring in your house is electricity, because it's concerned with moving power from place to place.
Amplifying an audio signal to
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Most of the wiring in my house is copper. Everything is electricity.... or is it magnetism... gravity?
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You made that all up. A relay has gain, so does a power switch. And electronics *DO NOT* _ADD_ power, they merely control the power supply!
How about a carbon microphone connected directly to a transmitter? The carbon particles react to sound pressure and control the power of the RF transmitter.... Electricity, or electronics?
How about a Branly coherer? Is that electricity or electronics?
How about a saturable core reactor? Electricity, or electronics?
How about a Hewittic merucry arc rectifier? A triggered sp
Rules and information (Score:2)
You made that all up.
I observed, noticed a trend, and came to a conclusion. You should try it some time.
Minor exceptions don't make a rule less useful. Check out Newton's Laws sometime.
A rule is useful to the degree that it conveys [read: compresses] information. We teach that the world is round because as a rule that statement is pretty accurate, and only later do we admit that it's an oblate spheroid or use other, more accurate representations.
I can't say "leaves are green" without some idiot on the internet pointing out that
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Leaves are green. Get over yourself.
Damn. I did have points a couple of days ago.
I guess I will have to settle for "well stated."
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It teaches interfacing computer code with hardware, and in the process it exposes the users to a bit of circuit theory, mostly when things go wrong. So in a sense it is a very basic introduction to electronics.
Rubbing a cat against a glass rod and playing with a vacuum tube is more on the physics side. "Electronics" is building your own Airband receiver and listening to ATC communication, or building a robot that would do something entirely useless or another.
And while we're at it, "Electrical" is typically
Hey (Score:5, Funny)
DuinoKit until you try it
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Hmm, this line of thinking sounds familiar.
"It doesn't teach you programming. It teaches you to copy paste, re-use code, and object oriented design. Stop calling it programming. If you really want to learn programming, you would learn Assembly you would fab your own libraries and DLLs and include them in your code yourself to solve problems that have already been efficiently solved because doing everything from scratch is for real men and building upon scientific advancements and technology is for losers."
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Anyone remember the old Philips EE kits [hansotten.com]? I saved up for the EE 2003 when I was 8 or so (and the rest is history). This was a nice range of kits that fit together to build bigger projects up to and including a TV and an oscilloscope as well as digital circuits. Along the way it gave a pretty solid grounding in the characteristics and even theory of semiconductors, explained on a level for people without degrees in m
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and besides if you really want to study electronics then RadioShack has everything you need including the Forrest Mims set of books. http://www.forrestmims.com/ [forrestmims.com]
Wait to get this thing until after you know which way to put a polarized cap in a circuit and you can hold a soldering iron by the correct end.
Fun Fact the Mims project books were all HAND DRAWN by Mims himself (and then photocopied)
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Of course it doesn't teach you electronics. An entire TV set as a bag of parts and a soldering iron won't teach you either. However, both can be beneficial resources to have while you learn electronics.
The arduino boards don't do much of anything useful until you start connecting them to other things. Those other things are electronic components. I'm not convinced the duinokit is an improvement over a solderless breadboard and some loose components, but the whole arduino ecosystem is a very positive devel
Slashdotted.. (Score:3, Informative)
Google Cache [googleusercontent.com]
Re:Slashdotted.. (Score:5, Funny)
That's what you get for self-hosting on a DuinoKit.
Speaking of Radio Shack (Score:2, Interesting)
I seriously wonder why RS hasn't embraced the maker culture. It seems to me that they can only last another year trying to compete in consumer products and batteries.
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... I buy arduino stuff from RadioShack all the time, they stock a variety of shields and arduino units. Generally handy when I burn up a board and don't want to wait for a mail order replacement.
A far amount of generic basic components as well. Of course they never have the power FETs or triacs I want, but not that many people are trying to build custom ECUs or high powered light controllers either
Re:Speaking of Radio Shack (Score:4, Insightful)
This article [sbnation.com] sums it up pretty well.
Everybody likes to blame the decline of bricks-and-mortar retail on the internet, and that may have some truth to it, but I think that a pretty substantial part of the problem is the influence of douchebag MBAs who have turned companies like Radio Shack, Sears, Office Depot, Best Buy, etc. etc. into dystopian hellholes of despair and horror. Try shopping at Sears in the last few years? The fear and desperation are palpable. I can understand in the current economy why the employees might not quit en masse, but why on earth would any customer voluntarily subject themselves to that?
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It's because, turns out, the real estate the company bought is a more stable stream of income than the retail company itself. The company ebbs and flows at a rate related to the human attention span, but the world is not going to be getting bigger any time soon...
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Tell that to all those real estate moguls that were holding onto land in detroit before 1970. Want to buy a home for $1?
Re:Speaking of Radio Shack (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually that was sort of the plan of the Best Buy co-founder wanted to embrace before the current Best Buy board denied his purchase offer for the company.
He wanted to embrace showrooming - it already happens now, so why not actually support it, encourage it, and turn best buy from a store selling stuff into a showroom selling stuff.
And it makes a lot of sense - people still want to touch and feel products, but other than Apple, Microsoft and Samsung, most manufacturers are not able to maintain a network of stores to sell stuff through. Enter Best Buy who will lease you out a space for your product so people can come by and touch, feel, play and if you can keep them in stock, buy off the shelf. If not, Best Buy will gladly help you order it online.
Of course there has to be a sundry list of items they regularly stock, but that is minor - the goal is to be a showroom where you may be able to buy stuff, but more so you can come and see and feel the product. In other words, the customer is not the guy walking in the door, it's the manufacturers of the products inside, and I'm sure with partnerships with Amazon and other fulfilment companies, they can get special offers like ship it to the store for free and the like.
It already is like that for the big players - when you see the PS4 and Xbone aisles - know Sony and Microsoft actually pay Best Buy for the entire aisle. Those product displays? Yes, purchased space. Notice how the Apple area has different (often nicer) carpeting? Yes, Apple paid for that area, AND the renovations to get it to be like that.
Basically, the goal is to fill the niche that online shopping cannot fill - the ability to see the product.
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Because it stopped being an electronics store a very long time ago. Now it sells phones, batteries, and consumer goods. Though a few rare die hard stores will still sell a few components.
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Yep, they bet that they’d become the 3rd party cell phone king. They forgot that in the US, the carrier is happy to extend credit for the handsets.
Bad bet, but hey, it happens. At the time, the other side of the bet was to start selling homebrew PC components, and look where CompUSA is now...
Re:Speaking of Radio Shack (Score:4, Insightful)
"You've got questions. We've got phone plans."
FTFY
Re:Speaking of Radio Shack (Score:5, Interesting)
I seriously wonder why RS hasn't embraced the maker culture. It seems to me that they can only last another year trying to compete in consumer products and batteries.
Do you remember TechAmerica, RadioShack's last attempt to embrace the maker culture, in 1996? They opened five stores in major metro areas.
They were wonderful. I could go in and decide which 10-bit A/D I preferred. The guy behind the counter knew what a 74141 was.
They lasted five years. Over the three year lifetime of the Denver store, the electronics section got smaller, the toys and gadget section got larger, and they still didn't manage to make their rent.
After that, is it any surprise that their current maker section consists of half a dozen arduino boards and shields and a shelf of TH resistors in the back? How do you compete with Digikey, if you have to pay rent?
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I would've killed someone for that thing when I was 7. And I'm only 30 years old.
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Maybe you didn't grow up in the West? Radio Shack was all over the place here in Montreal when I was a kid. It must have been all over North America as well.
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You have to be old enough to be trusted with a soldering iron. Next up, we live in exactly the sort of sue crazy society that would turn a small solder burn into a grave injury (for legal purposes).
Even adult makers often breadboard before they solder.
Cool product. Seems like a really nice guy. (Score:2)
Not only the product looks great. He really seems like a nice guy. I wish him the best.
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PD: I really wonder if he makes money out of those. All the parts it have and the time it takes him to create it I really doubt he actually earns much money at all...
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Go check out the price of Arduinos and shields on eBay. I just bought a complete Pro mini for around 2.50$ but if I only want the IC from digi-key.ca it's going to cost me around 4.50$.
Not a nerd, really? (Score:1)
And for those of you who worry about being called nerds because you're carrying a DuinoKit around, you can relax. It comes in a 'Secret Agent Carrying Case.' Really.
Because nothing says, "I'm not a nerd," like toting a Secret Agent Carrying Case.