Ask HN: Help assembling hacker Xmas presents for kids? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Help assembling hacker Xmas presents for kids?

7 pointsxrd3 comments

Hi there,

I imagine I'm not the only one here who has been facing difficult times financially. I wish everyone well during the holidays.

I have three very smart kids who are creative and like building things. Well, isn't that all kids?

I had been subscribing to Mark Rober's Crunchlabs boxes. My kids enjoy them, but I canceled those to save money.

I imagine there are cool tech projects that could make great Xmas presents, projects where I could source the components myself for much cheaper than something like a crunchlabs box. Am I wrong?

I would like to hear of any projects where I can put in the time to order inexpensive components and print out instructions on my own printer. There must be lots of people making these kinds of things here on HN?

Good luck everyone!

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I made one thing that I can contribute. If your kids are interested in Japanese, this is a project where you print out hiragana sheets. They can practice writing hiragana and learn the basics of Japanese. And, no screens involved! My kids used this to learn words like sushi or neko (cat). It was really cool as parent to see them gain confidence in something totally foreign to them.

https://kana.public.do/

There is a bunch of cool tech kit stuff on AliExpress for not much money. I ordered one of these [1] (not an endorsement as I haven't built it yet) and I saw a lot of recommendations for other cool things I wanted. Search for Arduino kit, clock kit, etc...

The downside is that the included instructions will often be either poor or nonexistent so the hacker in question will need to be confident finding instructions online and filling in the gaps.

If you are buying components, the best places are AliExpress and eBay for most things. However for some kinds of chips (expensive or retro ones) you may receive fakes, and the shipping takes a long time. You can pay more and buy electronics from DigiKey or other distributors (be sure to buy a couple more than you need in case they get damaged).

[1]: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803011442657.html

I’m very interested in this. Kiwico and Mark Rober’s boxes do something that isn’t very available right now- producing projects that have the right balance of being easy to understand, satisfaction and learning something new.

Most of the “STEM” projects that are offered online seem to be very basic (toothbrush robots with a vibrating motor).

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