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• It’s getting a bit dusty in here…

  Clyde D. Corpuz • 09/08/2020 at 20:30 • 0 comments

  Hello again!

  It’s been a month since I posted this project and I haven’t been active since. First things first - this project is far from dead. I’m not sure how regularly hackaday projects are supposed to be updated but personally I feel like too much time has gone by without me posting anything and I apologize. The pandemic has led me to focus on other priorities as of the moment but I still do work on the project when I have the time and motivation to do so.
  

  There are actually a lot of things I’ve been trying out and some changes/additions that I plan to make - all of them of course still fitting within the $2 overall cost. One hurdle with development is that I still haven’t had a chance to let others try out the prototype and provide feedback (I haven’t even given these to my friends as my last year’s excessively delayed Christmas gifts lol). There might even be some design flaws that I haven’t noticed yet. To be honest, I probably won’t be able to reach this milestone for the next 2-3 months due to the pandemic. On the bright side, I’ve been modifying and iterating on the design based on my personal use and tests. I’ve also made more PCB designs from scratch that incorporate the planned changes and additions. I’ve actually been making some of these even before I posted this project and some of the changes were mentioned previously. These PCB designs, however, shall be the topic of a future post.

  Lastly, a big thanks to everyone who has viewed, shared, and read about this project. I’m thankful and glad that a lot of people are actually interested in my work. It means a lot!

  - CC

• The progress so far...

  Clyde D. Corpuz • 07/31/2020 at 08:19 • 2 comments

  Beginnings

  This project started out as a little idea of mine in late 2019. Back then, I only had a year of experience with Arduino and electronics in general, but I've always had a knack for tinkering and figuring out how things work. Where I come from, official Arduino boards are considered relatively expensive, and the local market for development boards are mainly dominated by Chinese-made clones. I found some cheap ATtiny2313 microcontrollers being sold in a local online selling platform (around $3.70 for 5 chips) and I thought to myself, “Why not make a development board cheaper than a Chinese Nano?” (That’s only easy to say of course, and I did not expect that this small idea would throw me down a deep rabbit hole where I learned so much about PCB design concepts and electronics in general)

  I immediately bought 10 of those ATtiny2313 chips and began the project with the initial motivation to give the boards to my friends as Christmas gifts. I quickly realized that the ATtiny2313 wouldn't be up to the task of being an ATmega328p alternative (not by a long shot) due to its small flash memory (a whopping 2kB) in which installing a bootloader would render 25% of the memory unusable for program code. At that time, as any sane person would, I was using Spence Konde (DrAzzy)'s  ATTinyCore library so that I could program them with the Arduino IDE. DrAzzy thankfully pointed me in the right direction and suggested the use of the new ATtiny chips from the TinyAVR 0/1-series which have loads more program memory and RAM for about the same (or cheaper) price. Meanwhile, I realized that this idea could be more than just a simple Christmas gift to my friends, and instead be something that can help other people.

  Why $2?

  As we progress further and become more advanced (especially with the coming of Industry 4.0), people would need to be able to have more basic skills (such as electronics) to keep up with technology integrated into our lives, as well as to find better jobs and opportunities. To do so, there must be a way to increase accessibility to tools necessary to learn these skills, especially to those living in poverty (poverty rates are especially high here in the Philippines). Many of the schools offering basic education here do not have the appropriate learning tools (such as an Arduino or similar boards) to use in simple to advanced electronics classes since these kinds of lessons are not officially part of the local curriculum but are instead pushed by the teachers themselves.

  I remember an experience during my high school Physics class where we had to buy an Arduino Uno or compatible board to use for a day. Many of my colleagues had a hard time looking for one while some even bought an expensive, or even outright wrong boards which were never even allowed to be used in class. In the end, many of them felt like they just wasted their money as most were not that into electronics in the first place.

  What’s $2 for you? It’s not that significant of an amount is it not? As I’ve mentioned previously, Arduino boards are considered relatively expensive where I come from and are not widely known to the general public. The market for these kinds of boards is also mainly dominated by Chinese-made clones - which are good enough I guess, but these boards lack any kind of support and their quality control is questionable at best. The idea behind making it very cheap while still maintaining some sense of quality is to aid in increasing accessibility to learning tools by lowering the barrier of entry, especially to the financially disadvantaged. Also, for those in a well-off situation, $2 dollars would be nothing. It’s the same price for a snack or even a meal! By providing affordable boards, people would be motivated to create more projects and turn their robotics dream into reality. Another benefit is that it encourages more prototyping (Would you really prototype risky setups in official Arduino boards??...

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