CircuitMess Puts You in the Driver's Seat with Its Upcoming Educational AI-Powered Batmobile Kit

UPDATE(10/6/21): The Kickstarter campaign for the CircuitMess Batmobile kit is now live, and has already beaten its modest funding goal seven times over.

Physical rewards start at $99 for early-bird backers of the kit, a claimed 41 per cent discount off the planned retail price. Once the initial early bird rewards are allocated, the price rises to $118 — or $139 for the "Inventor's Pack," which includes a gyroscope and accelerometer module, air pressure module, white LED module, temperature and humidity sensor module, RGB LED matrix module, and an extension module on top of the items included in the base kit.

Those looking to back the project can do so on Kickstarter now. Rewards are expected to ship in July 2022.

Original article continues below.

Educational electronics specialist CircuitMess is planning something a little special for its next launch: A fully licensed build-it-yourself Batmobile — though not full scale, sadly — driven by artificial intelligence rather than the Dark Knight himself.

"I've been working on a DIY Batmobile kit that will teach kids STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math] for over a year now," CircuitMess founder Albert Gajšak explains. "I’ve been negotiating with WB [Warner Bros.] and working on this product for the past year and a half. Being a huge Batman fan myself, getting to work with the people behind Batman as a brand was a dream come true!"

The kit comes following the success of CircuitMess' earlier electronics kit launches, which in turn followed Gajšak's personal success with the MAKERbuino — a solder-it-yourself, Arduino-compatible games console spun off from the GameBuino project.

"For me, CircuitMess was never about the money, it was about creating products that bring joy and excitement to people all around the world," Gajšak claims. "CircuitMess Batmobile is a manifesto of everything I ever wanted to achieve with CircuitMess."

The vehicle is driven by an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller, with a Nuvoton coprocessor, while a dedicated remote control — taking its design cues from the original MAKERbuino in a pleasing throwback — houses an ESP8266. As with CircuitMess' previous releases, everything is pledged to be "open source, Arduino compatible, and hackable."

Gajšak has yet to share the educational material which will be provided alongside the kit, but has promised it will "teach you the most cutting-edge technologies in the world" — including, but not limited to, machine learning, computer vision, digital image transmission, object recognition, and artificial intelligence.

More details on the project, which is set to launch on Kickstarter soon, are available on the CircuitMess website.