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A comment on Kano’s next learn-to-code kit is a build-it-yourself laptop. Parent comment

Re:Kano’s next learn-to-code kit is a build-it-yourself laptop by tonyarkles on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @03:47PM (#15341944)
I mentioned elsewhere in the thread about my nostalgia for the Vic-20 and friends. Here's a book I remember taking out of the library when I was a kid: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTZ2tQMmpyOWtsRFk... I didn't ever build any of the robots from the book (there weren't really any useful electronics suppliers in town, and I hadn't yet discovered the magic of Digikey...), but I still feel like I learned a lot thinking about how it would work.

I just flipped through it again, and I'm 99% sure that the circuits in that book would work just fine with a Raspberry Pi. Obviously you wouldn't use PEEK and POKE in BASIC to program it, but if the programming environment that Kano is providing gives you any kind of GPIO access, this could be an awesome platform to introduce basic hardware hacking.

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Re:Kano’s next learn-to-code kit is a build-it-yourself laptop by cr0sh on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @06:17PM (#15343052)
> I'm 99% sure that the circuits in that book would work just fine with a Raspberry Pi.

Not without level conversion. Most of those circuits likely assumed 5V TTL logic, not 3.3V CMOS. But provided you did do such level conversion, then yeah - they'd probably be fine with the RasPi.

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Re:Kano’s next learn-to-code kit is a build-it-yourself laptop by tonyarkles on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @08:32PM (#15343903)
It's all BJTs running saturated. There's maybe a couple of resistors that might need to get tweaked, and you'd want to use the 3.3V rail instead of the 5V rail from the Pi.

The thing that excites me most is that it'd be super simple to make a revised version of the book that shows Pi pinouts instead of Vic-20/C64/BBC pinouts and kids could hack on it again. It's been a long time since there's been a really friendly all-in-one piece of computer kit where you could do that.

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Re:Kano’s next learn-to-code kit is a build-it-yourself laptop by IWentToTheWoods on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @04:14PM (#15342128)
Electronics and robotics aside, the directions for building simple mechanical structures like hinges and joints in that book are pretty good for children, too.
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