Their first product was the Tactile Metronome Kit. “After selling our first batch of kits, and even making a profit, we decided to turn our business experiment into an actual business in the spring of 2009,” Wolf says.

Their next kit, the Video Game Shield, turns an ordinary Arduino into a video game machine. As an open source project, users can create and share their own games for the shield.

Since then, W&L have come out with a line of innovative kits and plan to do some work with Android and Arduino in the future, as well as add features to their Blinky kits. Stay tuned!

—John Baichtal

This kit spares you that error. The pre-bent crank and laser-cut parts fit precisely; you only need scissors, glue, and a few evenings. Instructions are well illustrated, and online there’s a build video and a teacher’s guide. The delicate ’thopter weighs ¼oz, has a 16″ wingspan, and flies about 1 minute on 200 turns of the rubber band. At press time BirdKit.com was upgrading the kit, so yours may fly that much better.

The finished project is fun to use: you lift it a half-inch above the table and drop it to “roll” the die. A piezoelectric buzzer senses the impact and triggers the circuit to generate a random number and illuminate the LEDs. Everyone I show it to smiles at the way it works.

The kit comes with all electronic components, PCB, hardware, and a 2B pencil. It works with any pencil (the softer, the better), and is ridiculously fun for all ages. Reviewer Sue from Boston writes: “I have never soldered anything until this kit. It took about an hour to put together, going slow. Once I finished and tested it out, the shrill sound it produces made my cat hiss at me and run out of the room. I’d recommend this to any beginners out there.”

Reviewer Barry from Emeryville, Calif., writes: “I built a Drawdio and showed it around my physics class (which happens to be studying electrical circuits) and got a great response. One of my guys even started brainstorming a musical instrument, something really big and loud based on the resistance of a long copper pipe. Good times!”

The Mignon is complex enough to be interesting, but not so complex that a child would have trouble with it. It’s a perfect microcontroller kit for hardware hackers of all ages (provided you’ve got the appropriate supervision for the soldering at the lower end of that age scale). But with just over 100 solder joints, make sure to set aside a few hours for assembly, especially if this is your first major soldering endeavor.

There are two games stored in the ATmega8’s nonvolatile RAM, Maze Driver and Min Pong, which hopefully will get overwritten soon with your own programs.

For programming, use any compiler that supports the ATmega8; BASIC and
C are popular choices. You access the bootloader through a 9-pin D-Sub serial port, so computers lacking USB will need a serial adapter. Like the Mignon as a whole, its programming interface is extremely simple and does not require any tricky-to-use separate hardware programmer.

Reviewer Thomas O’Brien from San Antonio writes: “The instruction booklet is very well written and goes step by step with clear explanations. My grandson Ben, 5, helped put components in the holes of the circuit board, then I soldered them, and he clipped the wires. He likes working with the magnifier to see what’s going on, while I solder. I showed him how to insert batteries correctly (look for the plus sign). The kit went together without a hitch and worked the first time. Grandma, look what we made! Thanks for a nice, well-designed kit — an easy one that a youngster can help build.”

Using the power of open source, this shield allows you to make awesome black-and-white video games on your TV. It supports up to two Nintendo Wii Nunchuk controllers for an easy and familiar interface. (Arduino and Wii Nunchuks not included.)