Kano’s next learn-to-code kit is a build-it-yourself laptop | Hacker News Reader

Kano’s next learn-to-code kit is a build-it-yourself laptop

techcrunch.com

65 pointsTheVinous40 comments

Awesome.

I wish that these wouldn't just use a Raspberry Pi, though. If you just give people a Magic Computer Board to slot into a few other bits of plastic and peripherals, how much will they really learn about the hardware?

What about a kit that you solder up yourself? Not the actual components, but at least some headers or leads to physically separate the different logical pieces of the machine. The core logic board with all those annoying BGA components could be a single board, but the peripherals might be broken out into headers designed for different module boards to plug in.

The USB adapter boards or hub board connect HERE, the audio amp board connects HERE, the microSD card/M.2 SSD storage board goes HERE, the Power supply board plugs in HERE, etc.

And then you open-source a modular 3D-printable case that users can design in a web interface, snapping slots sized for different plugs/modules in different places on a shell, choosing where the screen/hinges/keyboard/trackpad/board should sit. Link to an affiliate-linked online printer for convenience, and stock a few default configurations.

Soldering sucks. It was easy with the old leaded solder, but with the new unleaded it's harder. Sure, you can use sodler flux, but eh. It's no for kids and there is too much that can go wrong.

Also, what do you really about hardare by soldering?

Why do you use unleaded solder? Don't eat the lead based solder and you'll be perfectly safe. Skin contact is safe. Wash your hands and clean under your fingernails after soldering if you want to be super sure you're not going to be ingesting any lead afterwards.

Soldering fumes are dangerous and toxic. Wear respiratory protection and ensure the area is well-ventilated!

    All solder fumes can cause occupational asthma
    and other health problems (leaded and lead-free)
    if used for long periods at a time. The best
    solder wire contains something called Rosin that
    helps the solder flow when hot. This causes
    asthma if you are over exposed and is irreversible. [0]

Context / background:

A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting the creator of the Choo Choo Barn in Strasberg, Pennsylvania [1]. He'd ended up with severe lung cancer do to all the soldering fume inhalation over the years.

[0] "Are solder fumes bad for me?" - https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/1904/are-sol...

[1] https://www.choochoobarn.com/

I most definitely agree! But as you say, lead vs. lead-free makes no difference, the fumes are all rosin burning.

I think "respiratory protection" is a little over the top. A simple small fan blowing the fumes away is usually more than enough; if you want something better, a charcoal filter vacuum fan setup nearby works well, too.

The rosin in solder is nothing more pine resin; it's identical to the resin used by violinists. In fact, it is easy and cheap to make your own "liquid rosin" for soldering (usually SMT drag soldering); you can make enough for a lifetime of use for what you would pay for a single MG Chemicals pen.

Good to breath in? Nope. But hardly something that'll kill you, except in cases of chronic exposure (that is, if you breath it constantly every day for weeks on end - most hobbyists won't ever end up doing such).

Now - acid core solder (not something you use on electronics, mind you - but generally for metalwork) is not something you want to breath in period. Whereas rosin core, while smelly, might just make you cough a bit (unless you are more sensitive than others), acid core will make you choke almost - and it burns your throat. Not only that, it can make your eyes sting (so - regardless of what solder you are using, eye protection goggles are definitely something to wear). Adequate ventilation for acid-core solder is a must; without such, you might actually find it worthwhile to wear a mask of some sort to prevent excess fume exposure.

You should use a fume remover when you're soldering, even if it's just a fan blowing the smoke out a window or doorway. Even the lead-free kind isn't great, and they often contain rosin, flux, and/or additives like antimony or bismuth.

Hey, side question if anyone knows; would P100 filters on a dusk mask help?

I didn't mention fume removal, but I should have. My thought was that it goes for any type of solder.

Importantly, fumes do not contain lead. Lead oxide fumes only start occuring above 450°C, well above normal soldering temperatures (320-370°C).

The P100 filter catches airborne particles larger than 0.3 microns. Solder fumes are partly particles down to 0.1 microns, but also gases produced from vaporization of rosin; e.g. toluene, formaldehyde, styrene. Those are molecules a lot smaller than 0.3 microns. So the answer is no, just a P100 filter does not solve everything.

If you need to use a mask, I would suggest a 3M 7500 half-mask with the organic vapor/acid gas/P100 combo filter. I use one for glue work etc. and it's got a very tight seal and is pretty comfy (relatively speaking). Will cost you about $40-$50. Does require a relatively clean shave and proper fitting (sniff test) to be effective.

Or you could get a benchtop soldering fume extractor with an activated carbon and HEPA filter, which is a lot more comfortable. Also more expensive though.

Cheapest solution is doing like a friend of mine, using his shop vacuum with HEPA filter.

Ah, nice - I do have a half-mask for stuff like spray-painting and worrying about the fit on my cheap laser cutter's exhaust, but wasn't sure how effective it might be.

You learn something new every day, thanks!

> Cheapest solution is doing like a friend of mine, using his shop vacuum with HEPA filter.

Actually, the most bare-bones cheapest solution would be to solder outside with a slight breeze. Only works in certain climates and times of year, tho...

You can't do that with kids. There's laws and such.

(You sure can at home, so let me clarify: can't to that at school, or at kids labs, like the place I was working in)

If it's for DIY purposes you can still use leaded solder if you prefer it.

Otherwise, not all lead-free solder is the same. Try Senju M705 or a similar SnAgCu alloy, you may be pleasantly surprised.

M705 datasheet: https://www.opendatasheets.com/datasheet/m705-senju-metal-in...

Not with kids.

Thanks for the tip!

This kit is targeted for younger kids. A soldering iron presents a real risk for injury, and most parents will probably not want to buy something like that for their kids.

If parents wanted to extend this kit to include soldering, they could just as easily buy an additional Pi HAT kit from Adafruit...

Playing tag presents a real risk for injury. Climbing a tree presents a real risk for injury.

Any kid that is old enough to understand the concept of programming a computer and being interested enough to pursue it is old enough to solder. Don't grab the iron by the business end. Wear your safety glasses. Don't inhale the smoke. It's that easy.

I think there is an age where it is reasonable to allow children to climb trees, play tag, and where they might be interested in building a computer, but would not be mature enough to trust with a soldering iron. That easy or not.

We're not talking about a chainsaw, a lathe, or a tool that requires a certain amount of strength or non-intuitive understanding. Safe usage of a soldering iron is safety glasses, not breathing the (fairly irritating) smoke, and not touching the hot end. It is about as dangerous as a screwdriver or a hammer.

Although, like those other tools, having someone skilled show you the ropes is a great benefit. There are lots of ways to solder incorrectly without burning yourself.

I think I was about 10 when my grandfather taught me to solder. I think the safety level really depends on the kid, and a little early-on guidance.

Yeah, maybe the headers could be pre-soldered, or just present as receptacles for pluggable cable ribbons that you also provide.

I think the important part would be breaking the hardware out of just being 'A Computer Box.'

Oh come on, soldering is fairly safe - the worst thing you can realistically get is a small burn. Compare that to say, cycling or skying (which is something many parents let their 10 year olds do).

> the worst thing you can realistically get is a small burn.

Never had your soldering iron roll off the bench and then tried to catch it, hmm? Inevitably, you catch the wrong end...

/but you only do so once... //wearing shorts during the episode can make it double the fun!

Dunno about you, but I stopped wearing shorts while soldering after the first time a large-ish ball sputtered off onto my knee.

It can make cool-looking stains on pants, but it's hard to get off cleanly without tearing the fabric.

Or set something on fire. Or melt something (like the cord going to the iron). It's certainly one of those things that needs a little supervision, at least for a little while.

I don't think it's so terrible, most computing devices kids will have interacted with had no way to look under the hood, they are glued-shut tablets, phones, and laptops and the like. Even just looking at the greenboard and seeing where things are plugged in has some educational value. That said, I don't see how this is different from the Pi-Top[1] which has been around for a while (they also make the CEED, which is a cheaper all-in-one based on the RPi).

1: https://pi-top.com/products/pi-top

That's a good point; and since you mention it, I was amazed just a few weeks ago when I took my phone apart and saw a small PCB with only a few SoCs, power ICs, buttons, and a bog-standard 3.7V 2200mAh LiPo battery.

I don't know what I was expecting, but it was still sort of neat to see.

I mentioned elsewhere in the thread about my nostalgia for the Vic-20 and friends. Here's a book I remember taking out of the library when I was a kid: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTZ2tQMmpyOWtsRFk... I didn't ever build any of the robots from the book (there weren't really any useful electronics suppliers in town, and I hadn't yet discovered the magic of Digikey...), but I still feel like I learned a lot thinking about how it would work.

I just flipped through it again, and I'm 99% sure that the circuits in that book would work just fine with a Raspberry Pi. Obviously you wouldn't use PEEK and POKE in BASIC to program it, but if the programming environment that Kano is providing gives you any kind of GPIO access, this could be an awesome platform to introduce basic hardware hacking.

Electronics and robotics aside, the directions for building simple mechanical structures like hinges and joints in that book are pretty good for children, too.

> I'm 99% sure that the circuits in that book would work just fine with a Raspberry Pi.

Not without level conversion. Most of those circuits likely assumed 5V TTL logic, not 3.3V CMOS. But provided you did do such level conversion, then yeah - they'd probably be fine with the RasPi.

It's all BJTs running saturated. There's maybe a couple of resistors that might need to get tweaked, and you'd want to use the 3.3V rail instead of the 5V rail from the Pi.

The thing that excites me most is that it'd be super simple to make a revised version of the book that shows Pi pinouts instead of Vic-20/C64/BBC pinouts and kids could hack on it again. It's been a long time since there's been a really friendly all-in-one piece of computer kit where you could do that.

This makes me so nostalgic. In my mind, this is a spiritual successor to the Vic-20/Commodore 64 type computers. Meant to be programmed out of the box, with an environment that is reasonable for a motivated individual to learn and hack on.

My son had both the CPU kit and the screen kit. Whenever a friend comes over, he proudly displays the computer he built himself. He is a god to them. Then he goes to use his macbook. In any case, this is a great, cost efficient introduction. We eventually built a monster desktop for "work".

I will definitely get this for him next summer.

how old is your son? if he's around 6 year-old, he's a god to me! :)

Same experience: my 4yo built a rainbow-colored case for a Pi2 B, cabled in monitor and keyboard and mouse and power, and knows it’s the computer she built. Following Goerzen’s advice, she gets a text login—so three years later, she knows about startx, apt, and finds alpine about as usable as iPad Mail.app. When the computer was disassembled for a move, we had a great conversation about how to put it back together, what was working where, and how USB ports defy physics and have three sides, one of which is invisible.

He did it this past summer, so he had just turned 8. Those kits aren't hard at all if your kid is already used to stuff like Lego. My son builds stuff intended for 14 year olds no sweat.

I love my raspberry pi, but to "learn-to-code" I would rather buy an Acer Aspire 1 [1], which is cheaper than this kit, has much better performance and a very nice flat design. With the remaining money I would buy a raspberry zero that the kid can ssh to, embed in robot/contraptions, etc.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Acer-Celeron-Storage-Windows-A114-31-...

Somehow, I feel like I should have something more profound to say here.

I have been considering getting one of their kits for my children to build and learn.

If you have a Pi already and a kid I recommend an install of the os. They have really done a great job, learn the command line as part a game etc.

http://developers.kano.me/downloads/

What would you guys think of a school that allowed kids to use their cell phones if they first passed a 'build-it-yourself' course with something like this?

Passing a course doesn't mean the kids magically have a legitimate reason to use a cell phone during class.

Sounds like it would work as an incentive for kids to do the course, but not much else. If your goal is just to entice a few more kids into having an interest in tech, that seems worthwhile.

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