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Hi folks,
As much as I loath the winters in New England here is where I'll be. Outdoor activities, while doable, can only be for short periods of time. Therefore I'm looking for projects that can be completed indoors that are interesting and take 6 months to complete. :) (Long winters up here...)
My son has shown an interest in both electronic and mechanical type projects. He'd like a hammer for his birthday so he can break rocks. Cool, geologist. Can't find rocks too well under the snow and ice, sand and salt, in the wintertime.
He'd also like an electronics kit but I'm not sure what to to get him that will last a long while. I think at this point he's more interested in building something, electronic or not, rather than learning theory. He often mentions robots but to get something that would last for months would cost me more than the budget allows.
I'd certainly appreciate suggestions and I'm sure there are other parents who might benefit from your experiences!
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday October 14 2016, @09:49PM
I mostly just use shell scripts for mine. You can control the GPIO pretty well using nothing more than the 'echo' command. The major restriction in what languages you can use is probably the fact that it's an ARM system -- because literally anything that can write to a file can control the GPIO. Although some languages will let you do it with a bit more precision than that.
That'd be great for kids though. Even an eight year old can probably manage to experiment with manually entering an 'echo' statement for testing and such, and maybe even put together a small shell script to automate it. Although if they've never programmed before, maybe consider starting with Scratch?