What’s in the box?
The basic set of Crazy Circuits comes with battery holders, LEDs, a blink/fade, and the bits needed to connect all this together for $50. The Deluxe set includes a whole lot more components, including the Touch Board, which gives you some programmable control. This kit comes in at $200.
The Touch Board is a Teensy LC broken out into the Crazy Circuits-style board, so it works with crocodile clips, Lego, and conductive thread. You can program this via the Arduino IDE in the same way you can any other Teensy board. It’s powered by an ARM Cortex-M0 processor, which should provide enough power for most maker projects.
As the name suggests, the pins on the Touch Board can take capacitive touch input on eleven of its pins. This gives you a wide range of options for manipulating your builds with your fingers.
Perhaps the most exciting kit for us is the Robotics Kit ($150) that comes with a broken-out Arduino Nano and a set of Lego-compatible servo brackets for the four servos (two continuous rotation). This gives you quite a powerful set of tools for automating things you’ve made with Lego.
Keep it simple
Brown Dog also makes kits with squishy circuits, sewable, robotics, conductive paint, and others, but these are built on the same technology as the other kits.
We’d love to have some networking options, as this would give you options for building an IoL (Internet of Lego) network. There are some pins available via male headers, which does give you the option to hook this up to, for example, an ESP8266 for network access, but this adds another level of complexity to your projects.
None of the methods for working with Crazy Circuits is particularly suitable for complex schematics. Whichever method you’re using, (crocodile clips, Lego tape or conductive thread) tends towards chaos as you make more and more connections. This is the price paid for circuits that integrate well with Lego and clothing, and it’s a price worth paying for getting young people excited about intermingling electronics and physical things.
Crazy Circuits may look expensive when compared to electronics kits that come with just bare components, such as those for working with breadboards, but this extra expense is justified by the extra options that the form-factor allows.
While the Crazy Circuits hardware is all based on existing technology like the Teensy LC and Nano, it’s great to see that Brown Dog has put together a comprehensive set of documentation specifically for this product. As well as user guides that cover the basics of how to use the hardware, there’s a projects section on the website, with a good selection of projects for you to try. These show off the different features and provide a good basis for planning your own projects.
We really like the effort that Brown Dog has gone to to make it easy to work with, from a simple circuit demonstration to integrating this into a device – of course, device in this context is something built by young makers. A simple circuit making an LED flash may not be that exciting on its own, but when it’s powering, for example, the lights on top of a Lego police car or making stars twinkle on a Christmas jumper, it’s much more attractive to learners.
From $50 browndoggadgets.com
Verdict
An electronics kit with great options for incorporating circuits into physical builds
