Space-Buddies (Kickstarter)
An open-source electronics kit that teaches soldering, surface mount, basic circuits, and programming in C.
Overview · The Story · What You’ll Learn · The Hardware
Overview
Space-Buddies was a Kickstarter-funded open-source electronics kit designed to teach far more than just soldering. The kit was deliberately built to cover a range of skills — from basic through-hole soldering right through to surface mount components, circuit theory, and writing firmware in C.
Each kit shipped with a booklet walking through all of the above. The programming headers were fully exposed, so the firmware could be replaced or extended by anyone who wanted to go further.
The Story
After defeating the giant evil space bear Grizzlebutt, the Space Buddies were headed home to celebrate their victory. However, a wheel of fancy space cheese the size of a small asteroid hurled them off course, forcing them to crash-land on the nearest planet: Earth.
The force of the mighty cheese wheel had knocked the ten Space Buddies so far apart that each one ended up in a completely different location on Earth — each in their own musical spaceship of glory.
Unfortunately for the Space Buddies, the only way back to their home planet, Symphonia, was to open a hidden space gateway known as the Vortex in G Minor. This special vortex could only be opened when all ten of their spaceships played their unique tune together.
That’s where you come in. By collecting all ten tunes you can bring them back together and send them home.
What You’ll Learn
The kit was designed to take you through a complete curriculum of electronics skills:
- Through-hole soldering — the classic starting point for electronics assembly
- Surface mount soldering — a step up from through-hole, working with smaller SMD components
- Basic circuit theory — understanding how the components connect and interact
- Sound waves and RGB LEDs — how sound is generated electronically and how RGB colour mixing works
- Infrared data transfer — using IR LEDs to send data between kits
- Programming in C — writing and flashing firmware directly to the microcontroller
The Hardware
The Space-Buddies board is built around an ATMega8 microcontroller in TQFP32 form factor. It is also fully compatible with the ATMega168 and ATMega328 chips of the same form factor.
The board is Arduino-compatible, but the Space-Buddies firmware is written in native C rather than the Arduino framework. This was a deliberate choice due to known bugs with Arduino’s timer handling on the ATMega8. The programming headers are exposed, so the board can be reflashed with any AVR-compatible toolchain.