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Education Toys Build

What If Your Electronic Parts Were More Like Legos? (electricdollarstore.com) 98

Posted by EditorDavid from the magic-modules dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader beckman101 writes: This week Electric Dollar Store opened its doors, selling interchangeable postage-stamp sized I2C-based modules for prices between $1.00 and $1.80. The modules include lights, buzzers, counters and sensors — the range is aimed at electronic makers. These aren't manufacturing rejects shipping from Asia — they're assembled, tested and shipped from a small farming town in California, where winter labor is cheap.

All the code for the project is BSD licensed.

The project is a spin-off from the popular open-source I2CDriver hardware debugger.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

What If Your Electronic Parts Were More Like Legos? More

What If Your Electronic Parts Were More Like Legos?

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  • Huh? (Score:5, Informative)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @09:44AM (#58324700)

    Little Bits:
    https://littlebits.com/ [littlebits.com]

    Gakken EX:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    Snap Circuits:
    https://www.elenco.com/brand/s... [elenco.com]

    Then there are the domain specific building block electronics - Arduino shields, raspberry pi blocks, MakerBlocks, mBot modules...

    And, of course, all the modules for Mindstorms, both from LEGO and third-party.

    These look kind of neat, though. Price is right!

    • Lectron [makezine.com]. I had one of these as a kid. No where near as cool as an I2C setup.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      littleBits is a neat idea ruined by pricing. ( https://shop.littlebits.com/collections/bits ) $10 for an LED? $10 for an AND gate? $12 to split your wire? $12 for a buzzer?

      The pricing of these $1 to $2 parts seem more inline with reality, though they don't have many parts available, and they've made them so you need to solder them rather than making them easily snap together. They may be a bit easier to use than a plain chip, led, or pot, having a standard pin-out, and a flat board to sit on, but you,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      These are a bit different because they require you to do a bit of soldering, and then write some code. More like Seeed Studio Grove or some of the Adafruit stuff.

      These kinds of things are actually quite useful for prototyping, not just for Arduino users.

      • These kinds of things are actually quite useful for prototyping, not just for Arduino users.

        Arduinos are useful for prototyping too. They're pretty popular with engineers who aren't neck deep in microcontrollers all the time, since they provide a cheap, well documented, easily sourced all in one devkit and programmer.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Whenever I use them I always use an external programmer and raw C for the ATmega though, because the Arduino IDE drives me nuts.

          • Whenever I use them I always use an external programmer and raw C for the ATmega though, because the Arduino IDE drives me nuts.

            You can program it over the inbuilt USB programmer using avrdude, and I usually use that. For me it's a tradeoff between how complex the task is, how much control I need and the annoying IDE.

            I expect though you can find the headers and .a files and use the environment without the IDE.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        they require you to do a bit of soldering

        Someone is going to get smart and add an option to order these with 0.1" pitch pins already attached.
        So we can plug them into a plugboard [wikimedia.org], just like the old DIP packages.
        SMD packaging sort of screwed up the "plug and jumper" method of prototyping.

        • SMD packaging sort of screwed up the "plug and jumper" method of prototyping.

          I still use it a fair bit. PDIP is still surprisingly availiable. For everything else, there are SMD breakout boards or failing that, deadbugging a chip into a DIP carrier of somesort works well enough.

    • There was also Project Ara [wikipedia.org] which aimed to bring the concept to cell phones. Google killed it off a while back though. That gives me a good enough understanding that I don't think the approach is anything that consumers really care about doing. It works okay in children's toy market or in the hobbyist community, but most consumers don't possess the time, knowledge, or desire to cobble together their devices from parts.

      At least it's a convenient place for people who do want stuff like this to shop. Sure th

    • Yes, this seems to be about parts for experimentation, art, learning, etc. These aren't "professional" grade modules that you can use to create your own commercial project. Not that this is wrong, but the Slashdot headline seems a bit misleading.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shess ( 31691 )

      Seeed Grove: http://wiki.seeedstudio.com/Gr... [seeedstudio.com]

      Sparkfun Qwiic: https://www.sparkfun.com/qwiic [sparkfun.com]

      But it honestly looks a lot like Wemos shields, except as castellated PCBs. Which I think has potential for nice low-profile projects. Main problem is that we only need so many temperature sensors.

      I think the real killer is how often they'll end up needing to add a microcontroller or something to force a component into an i2c mold.

  • My experience (Score:1, Redundant)

    by fubarrr ( 884157 )

    There is nothing making electronics manufacturing financially impossible in America, and manual labour costs are nowhere as important as some believe.

    In fact, there are major electronics makers even in Africa and Pakistan.

    America's problem there has nothing to do with costs, but spoiled silver spooned "business elites" who don't count anything, but money falling into their mouths by themselves "a good business case"

    • Well, as someone that runs an electronics factory, I mostly agree with you.

      The first part is: what do you mean by "electronics"? Are you talking about PCBA (i.e, assembled/populated circuit boards), or do you mean "consumer electronics" - i.e., cell phones, AV receivers, computers, etc. etc.?

      For me, "electronics" means assembled circuit boards. And sadly, there is a surprising amount of labor involved. Kitting - getting components ready to be placed. Receiving materials, Shipping. Paperwork. Regulation comp

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fubarrr ( 884157 )

        I mean consumer electronics, and I am well aware of how much labour goes into such things - not too much. I can relate a bit to your experience, but what is "a lot of manual labour" in USA is still nothing really in comparison to industry standards.

        In CONSUMER electronics I deal with, the manufacturing itself takes much less time per units than testing/inspection/QA/binning/labelling/flashing/factory configuration/packaging. And we are also not dealing with particularly big batches, 10k unit runs usually, n

        • I deal with non-consumer stuff. Contract manufacturers are still used much of the time for convenience and cost. They can be set up to have orders shipped directly from factory to the customer. Onshore manufacturing is good for prototypes, test runs, getting the kinks worked out, or final assemblies (for more complicated stuff). Much of the cost comes from testing the products during manufacture since they're being sold to more discerning customers and failures means more cost to us in the long run.

          Salarie

    • There is nothing making electronics manufacturing financially impossible in America, and manual labour costs are nowhere as important as some believe.

      Depends on what. What you can't get manufactured in the US is the bottom of the bin, razor thin margins, low quality stuff. You need easy access to the Shenzen market of super low quality components for that, with ready substitutions and even re-used parts at times.

      If your part is very labour intensive to make that doesn't help either.

      If there's some kind of

  • Lego* (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24, 2019 @09:53AM (#58324740)

    The plural of Lego is Lego.

    • yeah, fuck off everyone child I know calls them legos, every parent I know calls them legos, you're just being a douchenozzle.

      • "every child I know".... *sigh*

      • Everyone I know pluralizes it as "lego". Having an "s" on the end makes it sound as weird as "sheeps" or "pantses".

        • I'm gonna concur with GP poster here. I grew up calling them legos, among kids who called them legos, and I don't care what Interlego AG or whatever they're called these days wants us to call them. I don't get offended by people who insist on calling them Lego, unless they get all snippy with me — and then it's not with their choice of word, but with the snippyness.

          • I'm going to disagree.
            Growing up I called them lego, my parent's called them lego, everyone I knew called them lego.
            Legos sounds stupid, like "meccanos" or "sheeps."
            That said, I don't care if other people sounds stupid, so go ahead and call them what you want.

            • Legos sounds stupid, like "meccanos" or "sheeps."

              Or "maths"

              See, it's totally subjective, and has to do with what you're used to. Calling it "Lego" means you're playing with BRANDNAME. But calling it "Legos" means you are playing with BRANDNAME bricks. Personally, I don't play with a brand, I play with its products.

              • Legos sounds stupid, like "meccanos" or "sheeps."

                Or "maths"

                "Maths" sounds stupid because it's objectively wrong. The 's' in mathematics is the nominative 's', not the plural 's'. Attempting to abbreviate the word as if it were plural is simply incorrect English.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Maybe some people used to play in a sands pit with their waters pistol.

          • The same people who did maths in school?

            I called them Legos as a kid. It's a hard habit to break.

            And I just really want to say...
            Leggo my Eggo!

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Maths makes sense because it is an abbreviation of mathematics, which also ends in an 's'. In fact there is no such word as "mathematic".

              • Okay, it just doesn't sound right to my American ears just like Lego as a plural doesn't.

                Other nouns that are the same in singular and plural are okay, like "moose" and "aircraft". I just never took a "maths" class. I took lots of math classes though.

                This song just popped into my head:

                Mos Def - Mathematics [youtube.com]

    • Sure, in some other fucking language.
    • What is the deal with people bowing down to show obedience to a major corporation's preferred nomenclature? We'll call them whatever we damn well please. Is this due to the gender confusion thing? Fuck what people think.
      • When you're dealing with a trademark, there's a legal issue involved. Published for-pay articles can face lawsuits for failure to use trademarks according to the grammar specified by the trademark. So if you're someone who makes money off of publishing articles, you kind of have to care, especially for the big brands. Johnson & Johnson is particularly litigious about anyone using "Band-Aid" as an adjective for other things (such as "That patch is just a Band-Aid solution, not a real fix.").

    • It used to be that if you went to legos.com you got redirected to an explanation of this. It seems to have gone away, but the Wayback Machine still has it.

      https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by twosat ( 1414337 )

      I work in a library in New Zealand which has a childrens' area with "Lego pits" for children to play with Lego bricks. I asked the librarians, and the volunteers who supervise the Lego pits if anyone called them "Legos". Their response was in the negative, with a volunteer supervisor saying "It's a North American thing"

  • We used to be closer to this dream. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    We already imagined that as kids in the 80s.
    I'm certain, our grandparents did too, on their first mainframe/supercomputer.

    And back then, for most parts, they were! Backplane, bus, cards for anything, peripherals for anything else.

    The thing is, that integrating ALL the things and disabling what you don't need just became cheaper.
    But it quickly became a trap too, since the buses and modularity were done away with too! So you could not even do it if you wanted!

    I still imagine a backplane-like system with cards

    • The dream is bad though. Already I see hardware designers who treat things like legos, and it fails. You fall into a trap of thinking that everything is commutative; part A is good and part B is good therefore I assume that A+B is also good. There's pressure to speed up testing and validation and that encourages the quick and dirty approach so that the final products is.. well.. quick and dirty. Often things are fixed by by other quick hacks, if the fundamental problem lies with the board layout there's p

  • These look pretty neat. Probably worth having a bunch kicking around to save on a lot of faff for the odd one of and/or experiment. Much like arduinos. I probably won't get many though since for my hobby electronics I like doing things by hand, especially doing analogue things. But I only like doing the bits I find personally interesting by hand.

    I expect we'll get some people ragging on makers inn this thread though because we always get that, especially arduinos.

  • So I'm greatful a website finally caters to me by presenting a title and menu that is 15cm high on my screen and scales all normal text to size 32. You know ... because I read Slashdot from the other side of the room and all.

  • Combining all of these sensor capabilities with a 128 core Jetson Nano should offer some interesting monitoring opportunities.

    It would be really awesome to build a community around this.
  • If you are trying to solder stuff yourself at home. It would make life a whole lot easier for me if certain IC's were available as SOIC or PDIP even. Hard enough to get the damn things working at times without having to check under a microscope to make sure you soldered the damn thing right.
    • For all intents and purposes, BGA packaged ICs are completely out of reach of the hobbyist, because you need specialized equipment to install them, and you literally get one shot at it: if even one solder bump doesn't make contact, or if even one solder bridge occurs between bumps, then you're screwed. Remember that in a production environment you need a hideously expensive Xray machine to even have a chance to QC a BGA's attachment to the PCB, and even that's not 100% reliable, you'd need something more li

    • I've not done any BGAs at home, but I've certainly done small QFNs and LGAs due to that being the only option for some packages. Yep, more of a pain than SOIC and certainly PDIP, but they're not that bad when you get used to them.

      My personal tips are:

      Use stencils for applying solder paste. They're inexpensive (you can even get ones cut out of plastic) and make life much easier.

      Make sure you make your board with tooling holes (a pair of 4mm holes in one side) and have corresponding holes in your stencil. I u

  • I'm conflicted. On the one hand, things like this (and Arduino, and RPi, and so on) make things more accessible to the 'masses' -- but on the other hand, it seems like it's 'dumbing down electronics', taking away any requirement that you actually learn how electronics works at the component level.
    I can't easily count how many people (probably teenagers, really; this is the internet, who can tell?) were spending inordinate amounts of time just getting an Arduino (or similar microcontroller-based toy) to make an LED blink, or something similar, and they would talk about how they were 'doing electronics'; contradict them, and with a straight face, not kidding with you, would claim that "if it doesn't use a microcontroller, it's not electronics", and how 'analog electronics is old fashioned and obsolete, no one uses that stuff anymore'. I kid you not. Meanwhile they'd need an Instructible and a YouTube how-to video to build a basic crystal radio, and they'd be utterly clueless as to how it works -- assuming that is you could convince them that it would even work and that you weren't trying to troll them (less than half a dozen parts and no microcontroller? How does it do anything?).

    Someone else mentioned 'Lectron', from back in the 1980's; my brother had some of those, although I was never allowed to mess with them. Some might argue those were on the same level as what we're discussing here, but the fact of the matter is, those were just 'sanitized' versions of discrete components, eliminating the need for soldering or any sort of solderless breadboarding, you still had to understand electronics enough to make something work.

    • I do remember in high school that I had some interesting electronics kits. But I did NOT really understand how they worked. I couldn't get stuff to work without following directions. The fundamental flaw with these kits is that you need to understand some higher level math for anything complicated (ie, calculus, linear algebra, etc). Digital electronics on the other hand is much easier to grasp if you don't know anything beyond arithmetic, geometry, and algebra; but even that can become a problem if you

      • Here's a radical idea: how about people actually LEARN THINGS instead of expecting everything to be spoon-fed to them? I'm not directing that at you by the way I'd directing it at what appears to be an entire generation that can't be bothered to sit still long enough to learn actual electronics.

    • I share your sentiments, but there is a flip side argument. There are only so many hours in a day, so you have to pick and choose your projects and interests. If you are intrigued by radio or interfacing, you might mess around with analog and op amps. If your project involves bandwidth and remote data and IoT, then digital blocks are your bricks and mortar. Even if you had robust experience with electronic basics, your interests might migrate to other areas, or the necessities of a job might lock you in

  • ... would they hurt like hell if you stepped on them by accident?

  • Parts are cheap but imagination is hard (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Slugster ( 635830 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @01:32PM (#58325708)
    The problem today with having digital electronics as a hobby is not hardware-related, it's simply thinking up useful things to do. How many times have you seen someone ask "I got this Arduino/Rasberry Pi (as a gift, in a contest, some other way), what can I do with it?"... If you can buy from China sources, the prices of most common components is very very inexpensive. Chinese Arduino clones cost $2-$3, and for just a few dollars more you can get boards with other processors that are much faster and have more memory--assuming you write a program that needs either of those things. Display screens cost $3, basic GPS chips cost $1, various wifi/wireless chips cost $3, CCD cameras cost $3, laser rangefinders cost $8, a cell phone radio (requires a SIM) costs $8.

    I do think that the main reason for the popularity of Arduino is that both the hardware and the software were made specifically to be easy to use.
    Interest/sales of a given processor or IC tend to pick up a lot after there is an Arduino IDE board definition or library for it.
    I suspect that people assume that if they cannot get the "professional" dev environment to work, they assume they can still get it to work in the Arduino IDE.
  • Don't forget the Lectron blocks [wikipedia.org].

  • They've always been like Legos! Even back in the late 70's / early 80's... Yeah, you may have had some pull up resistors, or other crappy discrete glue, analog/linear bullshit in between something, but...

    Now get off my lawn!

  • I have none that I know of--yet, but when I do I hope I don't find them by stepping on them like Lego.

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