Circuit Scribe: DIY Electronic Kits

56 hours to go
over 7 years ago – Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 04:26:55 PM

Wow, thanks for all the support since yesterday! We are at 80% now with just under 20k to raise in the next 56 hours. We *can* do this, especially with your help!

Here's a reminder of how you can help:

Easy: Tell your friends! Share our link on your social media platforms of choice, talk us up IRL, rent an airplane banner! If you tweet our Kickstarter link anytime before Saturday at midnight you’ll be entered to win your very own DIY Extravaganza reward! Simply tweet about us & our campaign, include a link to the campaign & #fundCircuitScribe and we will draw a winner on Monday! We even made you a Tiny URL for you: http://tinyurl.com/ycgucwqv 

FREEEEEEE!: Everyone loves free! If you back us now through Saturday at Midnight CST you can get a free Mini Kit, just look for the special rewards that include Freebie in the title and back us before you go to bed Saturday. 

Get a deal: We’re running a special, add $20 to any reward pledge and get our Basic Kit shipped along with your DIY Kit; make any reward an Education & Application pack! 

Feeling extra generous?: Our kits are shipping in the fall, perfectly timed for holiday gift giving! Bump up your reward level and give a DIY Kit to someone who loves to explore or a special young one in your life you’d like to share your maker passion with.

You can stay up to date with the haps at Circuit Scribe by signing up for our emails, visit CircuitScribe.com and scroll the the very bottom, at the right you will see our sign up form, it looks like this:

Thanks for sticking with us!

The Circuit Scribe Team 

3 days to go!
over 7 years ago – Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 02:19:28 PM

Hi there! 

 We’re headed into the last weekend of our campaign! You’ve brought us so far, we’re over 75% of our goal, which is amazing! Unfortunately, Kickstarter is all or nothing, meaning if other makers & tinkerers like you don’t back the campaign to 100% we won’t be funded at all. 

We need your help! How can you help? I’ve got a handy-dandy how-to here: 

Free & Easy: Tell your friends! Share our link on your social media platforms of choice, talk us up IRL, rent an airplane banner! If you tweet our Kickstarter link anytime before Saturday at midnight you’ll be entered to win your very own DIY Extravaganza reward! Simply tweet about us & our campaign, include a link to the campaign & #fundCircuitScribe and we will draw a winner on Monday! We even made you a Tiny URL for you: http://tinyurl.com/ycgucwqv 

Get a deal: We’re running a special, add $20 to your current reward and get our Basic Kit shipped along with your DIY Kit; make any reward an Education & Application pack! 

Feeling extra generous?: Our kits are shipping in the fall, perfectly timed for holiday gift giving! Bump up your reward level and give a DIY Kit to someone who loves to explore or a special young one in your life you’d like to share your maker passion with.

Thank you so much for all your support so far!

The Circuit Scribe Team

Kickstarter Pals
over 7 years ago – Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 01:45:38 PM

I think the whole office has gone down the Kickstarter rabbit hole on more than a few occasions since the campaign has started. We're checking out what else is out there, looking for "best practices" to make sure we are communicating with our backers, and of course backing a few campaigns here and there :)

One project we are pumped about is from our friends at Tech Will Save Us, did you know we were both nominated for Activity Toy of the Year 2017 from the prestigious Toy Association? Tech Will Save Us, a startup on a mission to spark creativity and imaginative play using hands on technology, has just hit their Kickstarter target for ‘Dough Universe’! 

Dough Universe is comprised of three new make-it-yourself kits that use conductive dough and basic circuits to get kids learning about the fundamentals of electricity through light, movement and sound. Three kits each sold separately or together, Dough Universe is made up of the Squishy Sounds Kit, Bright Creatures Kit and Electro Machines Kit. This latest launch from the brand is a fun way for kids ages four and over to learn about electronics with good old messy play. To accompany the three new products, Tech Will Save Us is also launching an app, which empowers kids to use the digital world to bring the physical world to life. The kid-friendly app takes its young users through a series of stories and challenges to guide play and show them how electricity works. 

Bethany Koby, co-founder and CEO of Tech Will Save Us, says “Sixty-five percent of kids currently in primary school will have jobs that don't yet exist. We believe that kids deserve toys, which will provide them with the skills that will help prepare them for the future. We hope that the Dough Universe will inspire our youngest generation to embark on a lifelong love of learning. As a parent myself, I feel it’s important that toys be educational and help children through key developmental stages, ensuring they’re not just passive consumers of tech.”  

Outside of the STEM toy universe, we found a campaign that has a fun use for magnets (and you know from our first Kits funded on Kickstarter that we love magnets)! Magbook - A Modular Notebook & Organizer with Magnetic Spine; this is a magnetic notebook to Sketch your future, guide your Goal, fulfill your Daily routine, tell you what To-Do, and complete your Year. Complete personalization that fits to your palm and can transform the way you write and live. Learn more at their campaign, if your Circuit Scribe reward includes the calculator you could use your make a sweet budget layout in your Magbook.

We're nearing the final days of the campaign and we need your help to make this project happen! Any IRL or URL social shares around the campaign and our DIY kits is extremely helpful to us and we deeply appreciate all the shares you've already made. Let's make this happen!!

Thanks,

Stephanie 

Prototyping the Calculator Kit!
over 7 years ago – Thu, Jun 08, 2017 at 05:06:58 PM

Here at Circuit Scribe we like to think of the word prototype as verb rather than a noun. Prototyping is an in depth process that we hold to a very high regard. In this update, we hope to give you a peek inside what happens during our prototyping process and explain how we’ve created one of the cool products you can back during this campaign.

Before our prototyping process even begins we must first have an idea, something that we want to bring to life. Our entire team will gather around a table and a whiteboard then just start saying whatever comes to our mind. No idea is dumb or silly; anything one person says could spark another exciting idea in someone else’s brain. At the end of a brainstorming session we usually have two or three well thought out ideas that we hand over to our engineering team to begin the prototyping process.

The first part of the prototyping process involves a lot of research. We take each idea and look at what is already out on the market. What have people already done, what can we learn from that, and how can we improve. For our DIY Calculator kit we learned about how basic calculators work and how capacitive touch works so we could integrate these two things together. 

Once we have learned about what we need to design and build its time to start drawing out schematics and building models. For this step we turned to Saar Drimer of Boldport Club. Saar is an expert in making beautiful electronic devices and turned around an awesome first version of our calculator. His design used 18 pads on the bottom of a very thin circuit board connected to microcontrollers with inputs which can sense the change in the circuit your body produces when you touch the drawn buttons. This design is fixed to the paper with a conductive adhesive after the buttons are drawn. The calculator is operated by a coin cell battery and has a LED display. 

 

After receiving the calculator Saar sent us, our engineering team went to work making new iterations of it. We experimented with size, shape, and different display options before settling on the one pictured below. We switched up the color and shape of the calculator and added an LCD screen for easier viewing. We also designed a way to avoid using the conductive adhesive so the calculator could be moved around and recreated multiple times. By adding a slot in the circuit board the calculator now has a paperclip like attachment method.  

Even now we are continuing to refine our calculator. We are sourcing new and better components, asking for input for our community and design professionals on shape and style. Just like our brainstorming process we encourage everyone in our community to be vocal about what they want to see. We can’t wait to deliver your DIY Calculators to you this fall and see what you do with them.  

We were recently featured on BackerClub.co! They are the top community for people who are very serious about Kickstarter and we are really looking forward to the feedback and support from their community of super-backers!

 

Feedback Friday
over 7 years ago – Fri, May 26, 2017 at 12:24:39 PM

Possibly the best part of Kickstarter is the community of awesome it brings. In our first campaign, backers gave feedback on module design that was immensely helpful. We're 11 days into our second campaign and have some great feedback on our rewards - so we are adding the Hacker video into the Education & Application reward, as well as the Everything Kit + 5 each DIY Kit reward. We're brainstorming up a few fun ideas to hack your drone, but what do you want to see? Let us know!

The other great thing about coming to Kickstarter is meeting other like-minded makers. At Circuit Scribe, we are very into hands on learning and continuing education; when we learned about Blair Lee's campaign that brings the science of climate change into focus with engaging hands-on science lessons, we were psyched and thought our backers may be as well. 

Happy Friday y'all!

-the Circuit Scribe team