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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.

  • in reply to ntewinkel

    Yes Giga comes with BLE and the LCD comes with microphone and sensors.

  • in reply to ntewinkel

    I missed shopping carts the instant they disappeared Disappointed

  • in reply to DAB

    I like them a lot too, although the price has crept up. I wonder if an Arduino that used PSoC would improve their popularity.

  • in reply to dougw

    I am pretty sure it will. Several vendors (recently ST, Renesas, Qualcomm) made some deal with Arduino just for this purposes and Arduno now makes boards with much more diverse set of chips: many kinds of 8-bit and 32-bit AVR of several generations, Nordic nRF5, Espressif ESP32, many STMs, Renesas RA4, Raspberry RP2040, ....

    Obviously PSoC is missing. But to me it seems that Cypress/Infineon always focused highly professional market and focused much less to maker market.

  • in reply to dougw

    Me too. I keep post it notes of sensor PNs and parts used in other  E14 projects and challenges in case I won a shopping cart. A couple ToF sensors you suggested were on my last list. I also appreciated a surprise webinar lottery win of an nicla or arduino every now and then too. 

  • in reply to dougw

    And tbe Project14 solderless breadboards are handy too.

    The tooling category is a really good one to add, I never have enough basic tools - break them, bend them, lose them in the black hole on the floor, 30-20 awg wire, silicone wires, ferrules, various connectors, strippers, crimpers, clippers 

  • The industry has moved away from this direction but I'd like a dev board that featured a modern ARM micro that brought out a substantial parallel bus to a header.  Then I'd like an FPGA daughter card with a mating header.  The idea would be to decode the bus in the FPGA and create a custom peripheral.  What can I say, PC104 left an impression on me.

  • in reply to robogary

    I use breadboard and solderless jumper cables as well. The cables come in different sizes so breadboard will look neater when connecting components that are nearer to each other.
    image

  • in reply to dougw

    Me too!

    I would prefer if the finisher prizes were replaced with a $30–$50 cart option. But I guess it would be too much hassle for the organizers to arrange shipments of multiple small, discrete components.

  • 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