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The Ultimate Project Kit?

dougw

The question is what constitutes an ideal project kit?

Of course it is going to be impossible to come up with a universal set of building blocks that covers every application, but given a fairly generic set of basic building blocks, what would be the most common solution that you would propose - to fit more applications than other solutions?

Assume a generic project would include a microcontroller, a sensor, an actuator, a user interface, and a power supply.

What else? Would you include signal conditioning circuits or amplifiers? Would you include audio components? Would you include LEDs?

To get the ball rolling, I would suggest 2 scenarios - a high end kit and a lower end kit.

For the high end kit I would go with an Arduino Giga with its touch LCD, a ToF Laser Ranging Sensor, a servo motor, and a USB C power module. The Giga could use a small powered speaker as a nice option.

For the lower kit I would go with an Arduino Nano R4 and a 1" OLED display instead of the Giga but keep the ToF sensor, servo and USB C power.

I expect others will prefer a Raspberry Pi to a Giga, but we will find out in the comments.

Leave a comment to elaborate on your thinking.

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  • I can't get my head round the idea of an ultimate project kit - all projects are different and the solutions are not likely to be common to a broad range of them.

    For example - my current project requires short term high power capacity provided by a bank of 10 x 400F super capacitors. The power control subsystem uses switching regulators, 125A high side power switches, multiple power MOSFETs, 5A high side switches, an ST 32STG0 family processor, analogue multiplexers and more. 

    We thought about prototyping it using ready made dev boards and a lot of wire, but very quickly came to the conclusion that this would involve so many compromises (and so much hand wiring) that it would never be reliable enough for even the most basic proof of concept work in the field.

    So this subsystem is being built on three custom pcbs, but will take us a long way towards the production design.

    This is one of my more complex projects, but the basic issue (it has to be close to production intent to make it worth field testing), is common to many projects.

    So my universal kit is:

    • A PC
    • PCB CAD software
    • LT Spice
    • Keil/ARM MDK C compiler 
    • The internet

    (interestingly enough 3 out of 5 are free)

    MK

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  • I can't get my head round the idea of an ultimate project kit - all projects are different and the solutions are not likely to be common to a broad range of them.

    For example - my current project requires short term high power capacity provided by a bank of 10 x 400F super capacitors. The power control subsystem uses switching regulators, 125A high side power switches, multiple power MOSFETs, 5A high side switches, an ST 32STG0 family processor, analogue multiplexers and more. 

    We thought about prototyping it using ready made dev boards and a lot of wire, but very quickly came to the conclusion that this would involve so many compromises (and so much hand wiring) that it would never be reliable enough for even the most basic proof of concept work in the field.

    So this subsystem is being built on three custom pcbs, but will take us a long way towards the production design.

    This is one of my more complex projects, but the basic issue (it has to be close to production intent to make it worth field testing), is common to many projects.

    So my universal kit is:

    • A PC
    • PCB CAD software
    • LT Spice
    • Keil/ARM MDK C compiler 
    • The internet

    (interestingly enough 3 out of 5 are free)

    MK

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