Canadian startup lures kids into programing lighting effects
As for the company’s Wink and Ringo robots, the Plumduino with its eight lined-up RGB LEDs and multiple sensors stems from a fun DIY project that founder Kevin King and dad of two initiated to entertain his kids. In fact, with the tiny robots, son and daughter had already acquired basic programming skills and longed for more lighting effects, wanting their own programmable night lights.
All these projects turned out to be good teaching material which King is keen to share through video tutorials, educational guides, reference code, all available on plumgeek.com.
The Plumduino board comes with pre-programmed lighting effects that will work right out of the box but is easily customized through basic programming, with each of the eight LEDs individually controllable in both colour and brightness.
In its new Kickstarter campaign, Plum Geek also offers an expansion board that connects to the main Plumduino board while adding some extra capabilities. On-board are two potentiometer sliders to control the lights, create sound, a motion detector (with a range of about five feet) to activate the night light in a dark room, a piezo sound element to create tones, chirps, pings, and alarms, and a microphone to trigger lighting effects.
An IR remote receiver allows DIY makers to use a remote (included in the pack) to control the lights or other behaviours of the full assembly, while an IR data transmitter can be used to communicate with other IR devices.
Check out the Plumduino campaign
Visit Plum Geek LLC at www.plumgeek.com
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