Phoebe Wang and the team at DFRobot are “dedicated to developing robotics and open source hardware for the maker community.” Their latest project, the Boson Kit, is a set of electronic blocks meant to build creativity, logic skills and the inventive spirit in students and makers. The team is running a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund their first set of production components.
The blocks are heavily marketed as Lego compatible but also have magnetic backs, Velcro and screw attachment options. Four different colors of blocks give different functions: blue for input, green for output, yellow for function and pink for power. Starter kits come with a small selection of blocks but there are a dozen different options available just for the input category, from push buttons and rotation sensors to PH sensors and vision sensors. The campaign page says that more than 50 options are available for the blocks.
Programming isn’t necessary with the kit, and the campaign page stresses that the entire experience can be coding free and use simple plug and play principles to maximize creativity. However the kit is based on the Intel Curie platform and compatible with Scratch, Arduino, BBC Micro:bit, and Blockly.
Power for the units come from three AAA batteries or a standard 5 Volt micro USB power. Shipping from China to various countries caused complications that took out the possibility of a lithium battery power pack.
Boson looks like a great kit to get young STEM enthusiasts hooked on engineering long term, and also useful for tinkerers and educators. Several high end projects are highlighted on the campaign page, most requiring complex programming or building beyond the simple Boson bricks themselves (but the strandbeest is amazing, for sure.) I can easily see this as a useful tool for teaching the basics of inputs and outputs, or a fast creative exercise to see how to add automation to everyday objects. The campaign ends on June 24 and first units are expected to ship in what feels like a highly aggressive and tentative September 2017 time frame.
