Issue 26 of HackSpace Magazine features the Adafruit Drawdio Kit as a Best of the Best in their Best of Breed on educational soldering kits.
Another, more complicated, kit that makes the list is the Drawdio. It’s not going to be the kit we would use for teaching hundreds of people in a workshop, but again, with just a few students, or even one, this makes a great choice. It’s fun, easy to put together, and the end result is entertaining. We have even hacked a few kits to make other interesting musical
instruments. You can see a video of ‘Drawdio meets Unruly’ on the Drawdio kit website.
But what is Drawdio? Drawdio is an electronic pencil that lets you create music as you draw! It’s a basic music synthesizer that leverages the conductive properties of the pencil lead and can generate musical tones based on its resistance. It’s a lot of fun to draw a piano and be able to play the notes, once you complete the circuit. It runs off a single AA battery, so no need to source a strange cell size. And if you already know how to solder, go ahead and grab this kit anyway. It’s that fun!
HackSpace rated the Drawdio kit 9/10 saying “Fun to Build, fun to draw!”!
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
