Over the past few months I’ve been spending a fair amount of time enthusing about the fun that can be had with cheap electronic components off ebay. Primarily with enthusiastic fire starter Ian Isted .
A couple of Arduino boards, some basic jumpers and resistors, and a few simple components can be used to create a huge number of great wee projects. We started chatting about creating a subscription service, so a trickle of cool components would arrive throughout the year without having to individually order them. Like a beerbods for shift registers and IR detectors.
Some of our favourite things on the internet are youtube videos by that aussie bloke or Julian simply opening their mail and looking at the electronics they received.
This might make us nerds, I don’t know.
Either way – postduino was born.
We’re still working on the details, but we’re hoping to launch on kickstarter sometime in May.
A lot of retailers sell components for $10 that you can find on ebay for $1.50. The exact same component. For the cost of one of those components we can send enough goodies to complete a half dozen projects.
We’re hoping to fill a lot of peoples bits boxes really cheaply, share some great projects, and introduce a lot of new people to the fun of electronic tinkering by demystifying it. We also hope to remove a lot of the risk for people, as letting the magic smoke escape will only cost them a dollar or so, rather than $20 a time.
As an example I tried to tally up the cost of the car below.
Yes, that’s a wireless joystick in a business card box. The chassis was the most expensive part, which I think cost £20 including the wheels and motors. The rest cost no more than £10 if you use clone arduino boards.
Wheels and motors could have been £5 – and a home made chassis would have been more fun anyway. I’m pretty sure that’s cheaper than most people would expect. Oh – and no soldering was needed.
Steven Milne 