back to article Tiny tech takes Turkish tin-rattling title

The makers of a diminutive Arduino-based prototyping board have declared their tablet-sized kit "the most funded crowdfunding tech campaign ever from Turkey", after tin-rattling their way to over $60,000 down at Indiegogo. "Tinylab" is the brainchild of the rather splendidly-titled Bosphorus Mechatronics, which rather less …

  1. 2460 Something

    "is a modest $79(£56)"

    FTFY

    Not a bad price when you look at all the on-board stuff.

    1. Fraggle850

      Yup, hope their kickstarter gets them into permanent production

      That certainly looks like a nice playground with lots of fun toys.

  2. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    Blinkenlights and LED and LCD - must have...

  3. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

    Basis for school projects

    This would really be a good investment for schools wanting to really allow their students to do impressive things. Probably need to work out how to attach a screen and keyboard, or maybe a serial terminal through the BlueTooth.

    As long as the programming languages/IDE is up to the task. IMHO, port BBC Basic V with OSCLI interfaces to all of the hardware to give students a quick start, then provide more powerful IDEs for more serious projects!

    1. Lysenko

      Re: Basis for school projects

      Since it is Arduino based it presumably uses the Arduino toolchain - so (simplified) C, not BASIC.

      1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

        Re: Basis for school projects

        I'll defend what I said.

        To hook kids at school, you need to have something that shows results with very little effort on their part. The effect of a program that could draw coloured rectangles or fill the screen with lines, or make sound easily from something that that a kid could walk up to, copy half a dozen lines from memory or a sheet of paper, and then run immediately was a critical feature of the success of early personal computers. It was the immediacy that was the hook.

        It's much more difficult if you have to tell kids that they have to edit text in a file, learn a complicated syntax of a language like Python, Java or C, and then take them through the process of compiling the code and making it runnable.

        The complications of even the simplest IDE for a compiled language will turn of so many kids immediately, with no hope of rescuing them.

        I was working in education in the 1980's and I observed this over and over again as soon as kids were introduced to teaching languages like Pascal. The standard complaint was "why is it so difficult, when I can just type it and run on my Spectrum/VIC 20/Commodore 64/BBC Micro", and that was without the current exceptionally short attention span of kids today.

        Once you've hooked them, you can move on to proper languages.

        1. Lysenko

          10 PRINT "MR CORDUROY SMELLS!!"

          20 GOTO 10

        2. Dwarf

          Re: Basis for school projects

          Take a look at things like Python on a raspberry pi, there is no compilation and this will give you the eye candy you are looking for.

          Similarly if you look at the arduino framework, plugging in a USB cable and pressing the download button isn't difficult either, this allows people to start doing things in the real world - sensing things, flashing lights, spinning motors etc.

          Basic has its place in history, but would any any professional programmer really suggest using basic for anything serious. How would you feel if the bank ran their systems on basic ?

          So, given that schools are there to educate, then it's best for them to start on usable skills and good practices. Un-learning basic ideas is often a hurdle when people get into better languages.

          This boards place is in overcoming the issue of 'how do I hook up all the things I want to play with', hence making it easier for people to get started and get the bug for electronics, hardware design, coding or whatever it is they are trying to do.

  4. Mine's a pint
    Thumb Up

    Learning to use other interfaces than the KVM

    It could be used with Nanpy as a hardware interface for your Python projects.

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