If you have money to burn, look at Littlebits. Those babies come in handy for some rapid prototyping without breadboards or soldering.
But really any random arduino kit should come with some jumpers, a couple of LEDs and enough other interesting bits to get you through 10+ example builds. Should be plenty to get you on your way.
@jkopel, you’re killing me with the awesomeness. I feel like you just revolutionized my thinking about the aesthetic possibilities of planar plywood. I’m adding this thread to the "Transcending the Medium" thread.
I just hijacked my wife’s account! This is probably the single most awesome thing I’ve seen. I really like the paint job. I too thought it was metal. it is incredible. You’ve done excellent work and the Trekkie I am just loves it!
I loved the Krylon hammered paint. I have a green that I am going to get around to using on my bandsaw to go with the Grizzly tools I hope to start accumulating in addition to my Grizzly drill press.
This is such an all-around demonstration of skills: design, wood working, laser cutting, electronics, cultural memes, documentation of build. Thanks for modeling this all for us!
Way back when MIT was designing the Mindstorms, I applied for being a beta tester. Didn’t make it. The Arduino kits from Adafruit are wonderful. I have given these as gifts to some young folks getting started in electronics. There are so many projects in the Adafruit library and on line that uses Arduino, you can’t go wrong.
Regarding painting with a spry can, I once painted a short bed van with gloss white. Knowing every spray streak would be visible, but even that would be an improvement.
During application it occurred to me to try rubbing compound so I put on a good coat. The result was perfect, a smooth white gloss without a trace of the spray can effect.
Of course that technique wouldn’t work with a textured finish, but in a pinch you can achieve a professional finish with a simple spray can and some elbow.
Just want to chime in: love the Arduino stuff. And for those who don’t love typing at things to make them go (or are too young to type well) there are programs to control arduinos with Scratch (MIT block programming language) and even a scratch-like language (ardublock) that compiles to real arduino code…
I just ordered the Starter Kit! I had no idea such a product even existed, and now my mind is blown away with excitement over what it can do…been living under a rock, I feel like the world has just turned for me…
I just received an Adafruit Circuit Playground, and have to say that it is really awesome… although not quite as awesome as this project! It was designed to use to teach programming, so has a lot of sensors (temp, light, mic, accel, 2 buttons, switch), 10 neopixels (same as the RGB leds on this project), piezo speaker, and the pins/pads are already setup to do touch sensing (like the Makey Makey banana piano).
Takes away some of the confusion and parts sourcing of wiring up sensors to an Arduino board, you can use multiple languages on it (Arduino, Python, ?), and it is only $20.
I have been messing around with learning microcontroller programming coming from the artist side of the equation, and of the boards I have used (arduino, trinket, pro trinket, gemma, flora, lilypad) this has been the easiest to get working. Since it is being setup to be used in education, ground up tutorials are being written for it, which will hopefully not gloss over pertinent bits of knowledge because of expert blindspot ;p