NerdKits USB Microcontroller Electronics Starter Kit
Price tag: $ 79.99
Merchandise Description
Problem by yourself: understand by undertaking. A NerdKit is a mixture of digital elements and wisdom, which jointly will instruct you about digital electronics, embedded methods, and how to bridge pcs with the “true world”. The electronics planet has cha
Feature
- Learn electronic electronics with the exact same hardware utilised by the professionals
- Incorporates LCD display screen, buttons, buzzer, and a lot more
- Thorough, color guidelines with theoretical and intuitive notion explanations
- Cross-platform USB programmer & C compiler use 1 kit for hundreds of assignments
- No soldering essential! Keep away from burning your chips or yourself.
Relevant Hotel Manual Goods
What makes this kit is not the components, but the support,
Alright, so you got a pretty standard embedded electronics kit here. Not a big deal – pretty much anyone can go online and buy a breadboard, some LEDs/wire/resistors, and an ATmega168, but that’s about all this kit has in common with those cheaper kits. Coming from a software development background, I wanted to become more “in touch” with the hardware side of things, and so after seeing a post from one of the Nerdkits team members on Slashdot I decided to support their efforts and buy one.
Kit arrived in a few days in a generic brown shipping box, with parts in plastic baggies – not all that impressive. I had to register my kit online and download some tools and documentation. Then I saw the PDF. Woah. This is different. Actual work was put into this. Not just slapping parts together. These guys sat down and actually made a miniature “intro to embedded programming” book. Now THAT’S worth the money!
After skimming through the first few sections of the book, I was eager to get started with my kit. I assembled it together and turned it on. Nothing. Redid it again. Nothing. Freaked out. Posting on their forums got me a response in only a matter of hours – a quick email later and it turned out I had selected the wrong resistor for the contrast on the screen. Oops :)
Currently I am building an LED marquee, one of the many projects listed on their website that you can do with probably just about $10 of extra parts. Very cool. The thing I really like best about this is that Nerdkits has very fast and intelligent support. Keep up the great work guys!
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|NerdKits ROCK!!!,
Below are two of my reviews that I’ve posted on the NerdKits forum. Mike & Humberto are awesome guys are will to help in many ways.
I bought my NerdKit in October 2008 because of the project that I build for friends; I was becoming irritated with the problems associated with the analog circuits I was using. I played around with it for a couple of months; putting it on the back burner often. In the past month, I decided to get down to business and complete my first project that didn’t come with my NerdKit. During the past month, each new solution created and equal number of new questions. each question has been answered by the NerdKit’s staff quickly & enthusiastically. They’ve even offered some suggestions to make my code cleaner & more efficient. I really can’t say enough good things about the support I’ve received during the development of my project. I think the amount of time that has been spent by the staff supporting their product alone was worth the cost of the kit. If you’re checking out this website & thinking about buying a NerdKit, stop surfing & get one now. You won’t be disappointed!!!!
Chris B.
I have a story that I want to relate to the Nerd Kits community. About a month or so ago, I started having problems with one of my MCUs. Replacing it with a different MCU resolved the issue immediately. The problem was that I couldn’t compile any code to the chip. The compiler stopped at the “connecting to the programmer…..” line. I shot a quick e-mail [...] to see if they had any ideas as to what the problem might be. Keep in mind that this occurred before this forum had been released to the public. Mike asked me to send him the MCU that I was having problems with. A week or so ago, I received an e-mail explaining the problem with the MCU. While the cause of the problem is still not confirmed ( I’m absolutely positive it was something I was doing that I probably shouldn’t have been doing), the workaround to the problem was quite simple.
The crystal that comes with the Nerd Kit’s is set at 14.7465 MHz (I think I don’t have it in front of me right now) & 14.7465 Mhz is a multiple of 115200, which is the fastest baud rate of the serial port. Apparently, whatever I did to mess up the MCU caused the MCU to work at a different speed. To that end, the crystal that comes with the Nerd Kit no longer allows the compiler to communicate correctly with the MCU. The fix is to use a smaller crystal (in megahertz) while programming the chip.
So, what would most companies do? Most companies MIGHT tell you the problem and leave you on your own to fix it or they’ll tell you right before they tell you how much it will cost for them to fix it for you (or to get the parts you need to fix it yourself). What do the staff at Nerd Kids do? Mike not only told you what the problem was & how to fix it, he even sent me four of the lower speed crystals so that if the problem recurs, I can fix them on my own without any out-of-pocket expenses!!
For those of you reading this who have not yet purchased your own Nerd Kit & are interested in microcontrollers, BUY ONE FROM THESE GUYS, you won’t be disappointed. For those of you who have already purchased a Nerd Kit & are ready to expand your learning by building more projects, by your spare parts from these guys. I’m sure you can get the parts cheaper elsewhere, but nowhere else will you get support even close to support you get from the nerd kits staff.
I can tell you a dozen other stories similar to the one above but the best way to know for sure is to experience it yourself, you won’t be disappointed.
Chris B.
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|A Gold Mine of Experience,
Wow! I’m thrilled with the quality of this kit, and more so with the quality of support I’ve gotten from the NerdKits team. These guys, having graduated from MIT just a year ago, are a gold mine of experience and knowledge when it comes to all things electronic. Not only do they have the answers to all my questions, but they also have the skill to teach effectively. It’s rare for engineers to have phenomenal teaching skills, and it’s even rarer for two of them to partner up and start a company dedicated to teaching. I consider myself lucky to be a customer.
When I first got my NerdKit in the mail (2 days after I ordered it) I started by reading the PDF guide. I was impressed by how easy the guide made it to get an AVR microcontroller up and running in just minutes. The AVRMacPack for Mac OS X on the NerdKits customer downloads page is incredibly convenient. Normally it can be difficult to configure an expensive programmer and the avr-gcc compiler, but not with NerdKits. They make it easy. And the best part is, unlike an Arduino kit, you’re still interacting directly with the AVR microcontroller and writing straight up AVR C code. This is by far the best setup for learning microcontrollers with a single one-stop shopping bargain kit.
In addition, each NerdKit comes with a ton of sample code. This is very helpful for anyone learning the basics of AVR C programming. My favorite NerdKits code is the LCD driver. Having written a minimal LCD driver for the Arduino, I know how time consuming it can be to implement and debug a parallel interface. NerdKits provides the LCD driver code and examples of how to use it so that even beginners can enjoy LCDs in their microcontroller projects. LCDs are great for debugging and NerdKits makes it really easy to use them.
I was most impressed by the response I got from Mike Robbins regarding my question about implementing the discrete Fourier transform on the AVR as a modification of the sound meter project. He gave me a couple suggestions about how to improve the efficiency of my code, and explained them so thoroughly that I (someone who has taken no classes in signal processing) could understand them without a problem. Again, it’s very rare to find an engineer with incredible teaching skills. NerdKits truly is a gold mine.
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