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Brazilian Devs Launch Tiny $1 STEM-Oriented Microcontroller Board On Indiegogo (hackerboards.com) 83

Posted by BeauHD from the pocket-change dept.
DeviceGuru writes: A team of Brazilian developers has just launched an open-source microcontroller board called the "One Dollar Board," that's so simple and inexpensive that it can be distributed as standard teaching materials to kids in schools all over the world. The tiny board appears to contain a single 8-pin microcontroller chip, along with a handful of passive components, making it considerably more simple and affordable than the similar STEM-oriented and open-sourced BBC Micro:bit board. More details about the One Dollar Board are on its Indiegogo campaign page, where you can get one for a contribution of $1 (duh!), plus unspecified shipping and import duties.
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Brazilian Devs Launch Tiny $1 STEM-Oriented Microcontroller Board On Indiegogo More

Brazilian Devs Launch Tiny $1 STEM-Oriented Microcontroller Board On Indiegogo

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  • "STEM-oriented" hardware (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Well, is there any (computer) hardware which is *not* "STEM-oriented". WTF is that even supposed to mean? Is that a passive aggressive euphemism of "it's for nerds, duh"?

  • Sub-Dollar Boards Already Available (Score:4, Informative)

    by lobiusmoop ( 305328 ) on Saturday May 14, 2016 @06:13AM (#52110805) Homepage

    Read about this on CNX [cnx-software.com]. A commenter pointed out that there are already lots of Arduino compatible boards available on Ebay. [ebay.com]

  • Why not just buy arduino clones?? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Racemaniac ( 1099281 ) on Saturday May 14, 2016 @06:24AM (#52110827)

    The pro mini's are about 1.25$ atm, arduini nanos with usb port are 1.75$, and the cheapest stm32 boards (which also have arduino ported to them) are about 2$ (and far more powerful than an arduino nano).

    What the hell is this project possibly thinking of being able to add to that (except for high shipping costs, since i doubt that unlike the chinese prices i quoted above, i doubt theirs will include shipping).

    • None of those are Brazilian.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hughbar ( 579555 )
      Yes, as a Brit I have a big problem with the Micro:bit too. These things run out of road very quickly and are a path to fragmentation and divided attention. I just finished a year of volunteering in a primary school in London, 60 minutes each week of which 10 getting clunky laptops to boot etc. etc. It would be much more sensible to concentrate on Arduino + clones and Raspberry Pi + clones, especially as the community is good for both. Bottom line, I'm somewhat 'against' hardware that is STEM-only, much bet

      • Bottom line, I'm somewhat 'against' hardware that is STEM-only, much better to use real-life hardware with STEM lessons and projects.

        Almost all hardware is STEM hardware. The consumer-facing stuff is a tiny fraction of it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hughbar ( 579555 )
          Yes, agree. My point was phrased badly, I'm against community-less hardware that is built 'specifically for education'. Given (your point) that there's so much 'good' hardware, it's pointless. Another point against Micro:bit here, both Google and Microsoft are pushing programming environments for it. I wonder why they would do that?
    • Yea,,,, I hate to rag on people trying to be nice, but this thing doesn't seem to have any advantage over a lot of already-available options.

      If we can dream, here is what I would propose:
      1. A roughly-credit-card sized board powered by 3v, so they can just hook up a couple 1.5v cells (maybe attach the board to a plastic battery holder--they don't cost much).
      2. some capacitive button sensors right on the PCB, so some human-interface input is already present (at least 8 - 10 buttons),
      3. an SMD LED next t

      • Having a USB connection on there is nice but a lot of people in the world can't afford a PC. A lot of schools in the world can't afford a PC. Most places you can get phones now tho, and there is Android phones that only cost $25. You are way more likely to see a cell phone in the 3rd world that you are to see PCs.

        You could easily use a Raspberry Pi as the "PC" to program these things. It's even pretty overpowered for that task. The CLK/DATA idea is interesting, but would be horrendously slow.

        • Yeah but an RPI+display is WAY more than a cheap phone. It would be better to find the cheapest phone that supports USB OTG and use that as the programmer.

          • Yeah but an RPI+display is WAY more than a cheap phone. It would be better to find the cheapest phone that supports USB OTG and use that as the programmer.

            True. I don't know what the cheapest USB OTG phone is, but it's likely cheaper than RPi plus case, screen, PSU, screen, cable and mouse. Nonetheless, it'd be cheaper buying an RPi plus bits than a x86 PC by a fair margin, I expect. And a somewhat nicer experience than using a really cheap phone. Those things tend to be really horrible.

  • buy one get one free (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    now with a free zika virus sample in orders of one or more!

  • I'd have a bunch of those and use them as give-away business cards / presentation USB / Car windows ICE scraper.
  • These boards are so minimal, you could as well buy a microcontroller with a not too miniaturized package and solder some wires on it.
  • You can now get some models of the ESP8266 board for under $2, and it's both Arduino compatible and it has Wi-Fi. It's rather incredible, actually.
    • Pardon me my paranoia...

      I use those ESP8266 (12E) myself, but I've really come to question the low price level of these. They are crazy awesome for what you get, 4Mbit flash ram, WiFi Chip (with encryption to sport!) and a 32 bit microcontroller you can code with whatever you toss at it...

      But if we stop and think about it - the WiFi chip itself could harbour some malicious code to "phone home" some information about our networks...now ...imagine these deployed in every experimenters bedroom anywhere...a

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by RobinH ( 124750 )
        Well, if I was going to go down that road (and I'm not, as yet) then I'd assume they're not trying to infiltrate "every experimenters bedroom." It's much more likely they want to use these as backdoors into corporate networks.
  • It used to be, only Liberal Arts majors, artists, poets, sculptors, athletes, trades people, businessmen, and musicians could get their hands on, or knew anything about microcontrollers.

  • First, the $1 is misdirection: You still need a real computer to do anything with this. Second, ATTINY85-based boards with similar connectivity are about $1.50 for a single on Ebay including shipping from China. Search for "Digispark" (which was a Kickstarter project that produced CC-BY-SA 3.0 open software and hardware and got $300'000 for the $5000 asked). And the Digispark works with the Arduino IDE. I have a few.

    Bottom line: These people are years late to the game and there is absolutely nothing revolu

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