This is a pretty straight forward soldering kit with a couple of explicit goals:

• Do something useful: in this case it uses the BME280 Temperature / Humidity / Pressure sensor to give you a basic environmental monitoring
• Be easy: it's all through-hole soldering, no surface mount. This makes it a lot more approachable for most beginners (even if younger kids continue to tell me that surface mount is way easier)
• Be reusable: The Node-MCU, BME280, and the screen, are all attached to the project via headers, this gives folks the ability to re-use these parts in other projects should they choose. I also brought out the pins to a header at the top should someone want to extend from the board directly
• Be self sufficient: The board can run on 3 AAA batteries. and while the code is not power optimized, it could be made somewhat better. It's also capable of running from the USB port should someone want to run it longer term.
• Be an opportunity for more exploration: because the board is (intended) to run MicroPython a novice can approach the board and make modifications, or get it to do something different following a number of pre-existing tutorials for MicroPython. The NodeMCU is also quite well supported in a number of other languages, and thus makes for a good learning platform beyond the boards intended purpose.

This has been used as one of the soldering kits for the Albuquerque Mini-Maker Faire for two years running now, but is generic enough to be approachable for anyone.

This is a pretty straight forward soldering kit with a couple of explicit goals:

• Do something useful: in this case it uses the BME280 Temperature / Humidity / Pressure sensor to give you a basic environmental monitoring
• Be easy: it's all through-hole soldering, no surface mount. This makes it a lot more approachable for most beginners (even if younger kids continue to tell me that surface mount is way easier)
• Be reusable: The Node-MCU, BME280, and the screen, are all attached to the project via headers, this gives folks the ability to re-use these parts in other projects should they choose. I also brought out the pins to a header at the top should someone want to extend from the board directly
• Be self sufficient: The board can run on 3 AAA batteries. and while the code is not power optimized, it could be made somewhat better. It's also capable of running from the USB port should someone want to run it longer term.
• Be an opportunity for more exploration: because the board is (intended) to run MicroPython a novice can approach the board and make modifications, or get it to do something different following a number of pre-existing tutorials for MicroPython. The NodeMCU is also quite well supported in a number of other languages, and thus makes for a good learning platform beyond the boards intended purpose.

This has been used as one of the soldering kits for the Albuquerque Mini-Maker Faire for two years running now, but is generic enough to be approachable for anyone.