Nerdkit - an electronics kit for hackers | Hacker News Reader

Nerdkit - an electronics kit for hackers

nerdkits.com

69 pointssdp16 comments

For beginner hackers. Intermediate use Arduino. Expert build their own. 1337 buy the ones Expert built and claim them for their own.

NerdKits goes from beginners to way beyond... We actually publish lots of educational content -- see 18 free videos so far on http://www.nerdkits.com/videos/ -- that show off lots of programming and electronics concepts that push the limits of what most hobbyists are doing with microcontrollers. But we are definitely focused on education rather than selling products to professional engineers! (This is Mike from NerdKits)

this goes along nicely with the new CarlHProgramming reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/carlhprogramming/

I think you've done a nice job of meeting a real gap in the product space. In ten years of watching this stuff (mostly from the sidelines -- anyone more involved please correct me if I'm wrong), I haven't seen much in the way of an all-in-one kit that includes actual interesting components and well-written / MIT-literate instructional content.

The quality online presence -- forums and video tutorials! -- may even be a killer feature.

I don't understand where you get the notion that Arduino is not geared towards beginners.

Arduino centers around pre-built, (mostly) solderless modules, included libraries for doing almost everything complicated, and a high level development environment that abstracts away everything the libraries don't; this is hardly "intermediate level" microcontroller development.

I am in no way disparaging Arduino, by the way! I'm actually friends with one of the guys who develops it, and I'm convinced it's excellent. But "intermediate" it is not.

I'd say, if you want to establish a taxonomy of microcontroller development skill, beginner would include pretty much any pre-built kit that uses a high level language, intermediate would be people who either build their own boards or program pre-built ones in assembler, and advanced would involve discarding both pre-built boards and high level languages.

As good as, e.g., SDCC is, most microcontroller ISAs are just not designed with compilation in mind. When every instruction counts, incurring gobs of overhead to accomodate a calling convention just won't cut it.

EDIT: By the way, I've done a lot of development with Atmel AVR, Microchip PIC, and 8051 processors, and though the more modern RISC architecture of the AVR is leaps and bounds more friendly to compilation than the PIC, I can regularly beat AVR-gcc and SDCC for code size.

EDIT 2: I meant to comment in the above that I'm very pleased to see that the Nerd Kit doesn't try to abstract away most stuff like the Arduino kits do. "Just magically working" is fine when you want to bang something out and don't want to know how it works, but in terms of microcontroller erudition nothing beats having to bootstrap yourself.

I think Arduino aim to give you a uController to do cool stuff with - without you having to worry about the details of boot loaders.

Either way it's all great - goes back to the days when kids could monitor and control things from their AppleII and C64s rather than just stringing bits of frameworks together to make web pages.

most microcontroller ISAs are just not designed with compilation in mind

This is true, but the AVR's architecture was specifically designed to be friendly to C. That was one of the reasons I became interested in it: after years of programming HC11s and HC05's in assembly, I had had enough :-)

For me code size has almost never been an issue (and only then when I needed to add a bunch of features without changing the hardware): the MCU memories are getting bigger all the time.

Here is Austin there is a local company that will make microprocessors for you if you bring in your diagram. That is a real nerd kit!

But this is a great beginner kit and I enjoyed looking through the projects that people have built using it:

http://www.nerdkits.com/projects/

That page shows some of our projects, but also see the "video tutorials" at http://www.nerdkits.com/videos/ , and also buried on our forum there are many customer projects. For example: a hamster wheel sensor which graphs how far a hamster runs at night ( http://www.nerdkits.com/forum/thread/197/ and https://sites.google.com/site/hamometer/ ), a home-brewed beer fermentation controller ( http://www.nerdkits.com/forum/thread/61/ ), a tractor sled monitor ( http://www.nerdkits.com/forum/thread/58/#post1232 ), and a LED tetris game ( http://www.nerdkits.com/forum/thread/167/ ). (I am Mike from NerdKits)

I've been looking for something exactly like this. I'm trying to get into the physical side of EECS and this is perfect because it comes with the board, controller, instructions, and everything else you need to make a simple project. All the others cost too much and don't include what this does.

Aren't arduinos a fraction of the cost and have a much larger community?

I can think of a number of advantages the NerdKit has with regards to certain niches (think linux vs. Mac, or linux from scratch vs. Ubuntu if you prefer), but here's one: marketed in a certain way, a NerdKit is something a non-techie parent could buy and give to a kid as a gift. Gifting an Arduino properly would involve lots of educated shopping and research, and probably hand-holding after that.

I already have a Ph.D. in EE and even I don't have the time to choose the proper Arduino and read the basic docs and figure out what to do with the thing. [1]

And, though I love browsing Digikey or wandering the aisles at You-Do-It Electronics -- because I already know how -- such activity also takes a bunch of time, plus you end up either buying lots of extra stuff or risking that you will forget to buy something, or buy the wrong thing, and need to make one or more repeat trips. This risk is especially huge if you're new to electronics and don't already have several drawers full of miscellaneous capacitors and hookup wire and op amps and LEDs.

So I can definitely see the value here.

[1] One of these days I will just pick some arbitrary project out of Make magazine and follow the little steps. Or perhaps I will buy a NerdKit!

Once you factor in the parts included in the kit, the prices aren't that bad. Compare the USB kit to adafruit's USB Arduino kit: http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&... . The nerdkit is slightly more, but includes an LCD screen.

Would the tutorials be 'portable' between platforms? They both use atmega chips. I just got my arduino a couple of weeks ago & would love to run through some of these projects.

"The purpose of NerdKits is to reduce the risks involved with getting started in the electronics field."

That's great. What you start with doesn't matter so much, because once you've grasped many possibilities that one kit allows, you've also built the confidence that, yes, you can learn and you can do. Then you can explore other areas with that confidence. MM & breadboard can conquer all!

I'm one of those weirdos that think that analog is more fun than digital, but it's certainly important to be exposed to both sides.

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