Soldering Kits make excellent gifts

We currently have 3 soldering kits that would make excellent Christmas gifts for a maker or electronics enthusiast.

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At $7.99 we have the Christmas Soldering Kit. A fun little soldering project for Arduino or Raspberry Pi that you can finish in an hour.

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For a little less, at $5.99, we have the Serial Adaptor Kit for LCD displays. This kit allows you to connect an LCD to your microcontroller project through a serial port, so instead of using 6 to 10 pins for the LCD you need only one or two. This kit works with Arduino and Raspberry Pi boards.

Finally, we have the Face! A soldering kit we have been selling for years. It listens to noises in the room. If it hears something it opens its eyes and looks at it. Put the Face on a table between you and a friend and it will follow your conversation with its eyes. The Face kit is fully self contained with it’s own controller for $19.99.

We’re working on lots more kits. We let you know here when they are released.

‘Make it in an afternoon’ kits

Soldering_ironWe are working on series of kit projects that fall into the ‘make it in an afternoon’ category. They’ll range from cheap, super simple kits aimed mainly at young makers through to sophisticated kits that older makers can use to impress their friends. We’re starting with a list of about ten kits. We’ll bring you more news as we have it.

In the meantime, if you have an idea for a kit add it in a comment below.

Using the Serial LCD Adaptor for LCDs

Our first crowd-funding campaign was for the Serial LCD Adaptor kits. The product page in the AusThai Shop gives you some of the details on the operation of the kit. We thought it would be useful to give a general overview of  how you might use the kit.

The obvious advantage has been stated a few times now. The number of pins you will use on your microcontroller is greatly reduced. The Serial LCD Adaptor works with three types of serial link and has two operating modes to give you maximum flexibility. Continue reading Using the Serial LCD Adaptor for LCDs

Turn the Raspberry Pi into a headless server with the Serial LCD Adaptor Kit

2Here is just one possible application of the Serial LCD Adaptor kit. Using a raspberry Pi and just four wires you can create a headless web server. In this example we use the LCD to display the server status without the need for a HDMI display.

The possibilities for this serial adaptor are endless. We crowdfunded this project several years ago. You can buy them now in the AusThai Shop:

Serial Adaptor Kit for LCD displays

For just $6 you can have one of these kits.

Another Project Idea: Tic-Tac-Toe soldering kit

tic_tac_toeThis project is intended for our collection of easy ‘make it in an afternoon’ soldering kits.

It will be a small board with 9 dual colour LEDs arranged in the usual Tic-Tac-Toe pattern. There will be nine small buttons arranged in the same way below the LEDs. There will be an additional LED to indicate whose turn is next. A long press on the centre button will clear the screen for a new game. A second long press will select one of three modes. Mode 1 will be one human player against the machine, human goes first, mode 2 will be one human player against the machine, machine goes first and mode 3 will be two human players.

So it should be fun to build and fun to play afterwards.

Another project idea: Connect-4 soldering kit

connect-4This project is intended for our collection of easy soldering kits.

It will be a medium sized board with 42 dual colour LEDs arranged in the usual Connect-4 pattern. There will be seven small buttons arranged below the LEDs, one for each column. There will be an additional LED to indicate whose turn is next. A long press on any button will clear the screen for a new game. A second long press will select one of three modes. Mode 1 will be one human player against the machine, human goes first, mode 2 will be one human player against the machine, machine goes first and mode 3 will be two human players.

We are looking at the algorithm for the machine player on this one. It is not a well known algorithm like the one we will use in the Tic-Tac-Toe project. Any algorithm geniuses out there want to make suggestions?