Short Circuits Is a Platform for Learning Electronics

Martyn Evans has been teaching STEM lessons for several years, and decided to make a learning platform that condenses his lessons down into an easily accessible kit – or rather four kits, plus another four on the way!

The base of his Short Circuits system, is a motherboard that acts as a build-it-yourself Arduino Uno-compatible board. There’s also a digitizer that displays numbers (and some letters); a sensor array, with a microphone, DHT11 temp/humidity unit, LDR, and a micro SD slot; and a 4x4 RGB LED matrix that lights up on command.

The system comes with instructions, and has the actual circuit printed on each PCB. Each has a 100mm x 100mm form factor and can be stacked, placed side-by-side, or even arranged orthogonally to each other to form a cube.

Short Circuits is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter, with a £17 pledge level (~$25 USD) for the motherboard and components, going up to £58 (~83 USD) for all four kits available as of this writing.

Devices under development include a power board, switch board, sound board, and an 8x8 LED matrix, so the platform should be even more fun in the future. Manuals will be provided in a PDF format for assembly and usage, and the kits are meant to teach soldering, fault finding, circuit design, and coding. It’s a beautifully designed system, and if you’re excited to get one (or more), delivery is slated in August 2021 — just around the corner in crowdfunding terms!