This week we’re taking a ‘quick’ look at a new plug-and-play from the most-well-known maker company in the world. It’s Arduino’s AKX00069 Plug and Make Kit. This new starter kit is even easier to use than the famous Arduino Starter Pack, so it’s perfect for beginners or students or a gift to someone who is interested in starting their Making journey.
Arduino is famous for their classic “Arduino Uno” boards, and part of what made the Uno-family so good for prototyping is the sockets soldered into the GPIO pads. This allowed plugging wires directly in from the main board to a breadboard without soldering headers or wires directly to a PCB.
Since a lot of makers start out without soldering iron, or they’re in workshops or schools that don’t permit hot tools it was a revolutionary way to wire up electronics.
Following up on the success, Arduino came up with a full Arduino Starter Kit with dozens of components to practice working with LEDs, motors, displays, servos and sensors. This quickly became a #1 top seller for folks who wanted to learn Arduino.
Could they improve on this classic? It appears so! Using the Arduino UNO R4 WiFi we covered on EYE on NPI a year ago and the built in JST-SH connector for I2C, you can now skip the breadboard completely and use use JST SH cables a.k.a Sparkfun QWIIC / Adafruit Stemma QT.
Cables come in a variety of lengths to add LEDs, buttons, sensors and more. Plug these in together as desired to create custom interfaces that can also connect to the Internet for networked / IoT projects.
The kit comes with boards, nicknamed Modulinos. Each Modulino uses I2C to communicate so that they all share the same bus pins and have a chainable connection without the worry of addressing or chip selects.
There’s the popular I2C favorites that use an STM32C011F4U6TR as a ‘generalized’ I2C expander, much like seesaw. This lets them have an RGB Pixel board, Buzzer board, Buttons board and Rotary Encoder board in addition to HS3003 temperature+humidity, VL53L4CD distance sensor, and LSM6DSOX 6-DoF IMU sensors.
To make your project semi-permanent, and keep it off your desk, the kit also come with a Modulino base plate with plated holes and mounting hardware. Each Modulino is the same size so it’s easy to set up the mounting standoffs and then swap out the modules.
And if you want to design your own Modulinos, you can create your own: Files for all of the boards are open source hardware and downloadable at https://docs.arduino.cc/resources/schematics/AKX00069-schematics.pdf. Firmware code files do not seem to be published yet.
There are dozens of ‘free content’ project tutorials available at their Plug-and-Make Kit landing page and once you get the basic I/O examples running, you can use Arduino Cloud to make Internet connected devices.
If you want to give the gift of learning, or perhaps you want to get into project/product design without the tools and fuss of a full workbench, then the Arduino Plug and Make Kit is the same price as the old Arduino Starter Kit but with a ton more capability, with faster time-to-success. Best of all, it’s in stock right now at DigiKey for immediate shipping. Order today and you’ll be pluggin’ and makin’ by tomorrow afternoon.
See the EYE on NPI video and the Arduino video below:
