Elenco Snap Circuits Snapino Review - Review 2022

Elenco's Snap Circuits line is the most affordable—and besides one of the easiest—ways for kids to get into basic electronics. With an array of lights, switches, and buzzers, it feels more like classic Radio Shack hacking than college-level kits such as LittleBits or Lego Boost practise. The new $49.99 Snapino kit (recommended for ages 12 and up) adds an Arduino UNO circuit board (a tiny simply real estimator) to the mix, giving Snap Circuits its first true programmability. But your kids (and you) are going to take to exist real self-starters when information technology comes to learning how to employ it.

What'southward a Snapino?

Snap Circuits is a line of electronics kits that use clothing-type snaps to connect parts—conductors, antennas, batteries, solar cells, capacitors, and so on—and create electrical circuits, and then use them to create all kinds of electronics-powered projects. The pieces are big, tough, plastic, and colorful, so they're meliorate for younger or rougher kids than more than fragile kits with smaller pieces are. Yous can purchase big sets or individual parts.

Elenco Snap Circuits Snapino

You lot can't talk most Snap Circuits kits without talking about how much (or actually, how trivial) they price. The Snapino kit is $49.95. The base of operations Snap Circuits 100 kit, which lets you power an electrical fan, make music and alarms, and more, costs $34.95. The bigger Snap Circuits 300 kit, which adds a ready of capacitors, resistors, and radio components, is $66.95. As for individual parts, a four-snap connector, for example, costs $i. By comparing, you can't get a LittleBits kit for less than $100, and the LittleBits Arduino Bit solitary costs $39.95.

The Snapino kit is clearly meant to be combined with other Snap Circuits kits. Information technology comes with a pocket-size baseboard, a few LEDs, a phototransistor, a resistor, and a switch, and the new element in this kit, the Arduino circuit, that can command the radio, fan, music-creation circuits, and other gadgets the company offers.

Elenco Snap Circuits Snapino

The Arduino part comes with 4 snaps that connect to its pins, plus power and footing snaps. The kit likewise includes a pin-to-snap wire that can convert whatever pin into a snap. You tin can power the Arduino via USB or with a 9V battery box (the bombardment isn't included, just the box is). Eventually yous'll be able to buy boosted pin-to-snap wires from Elenco'due south website, although they aren't available yet.

Arduin-WHO?

I tried the Snapino kit along with an 11-yr-erstwhile who'south already familiar with Snap Circuits. She grabbed the LED light circuit, and within a few minutes, she was using the Arduino part purely as a power source, to power the light and a fan.

Elenco Snap Circuits Snapino

But when we tried to program information technology, we fell off a cliff. Installing the Arduino IDE software on a Mac and a PC, connecting it to the kit via USB, and uploading code was simple enough. The Snapino kit comes with a booklet that gives exact instructions for 20 rather irksome projects—mostly getting lights to blink in various patterns to illustrate what the pins on the Arduino do. That'southward fine, as far it goes.

But it plunges you into the Arduino IDE linguistic communication (a variant of C++) fast, with piddling introduction to the bones concepts. That tin can be an intensely cold bath for kids whose only feel is with block languages or hardware-but Snap Circuits kits.

We built a couple of the blinking-lights projects, simply our child tester (who is fluent in Scratch and Tynker merely not command-line languages) chop-chop wanted to get back to snapping circuits and integrating other components. And we couldn't observe proficient guides, examples, or projects for how to integrate the circuits in other kits via Arduino. Elenco's site lacks a rich community or a skillful library of crowdsourced projects.

Elenco Snap Circuits Snapino

That makes this kit much ameliorate for cocky-starting kids who are willing to experiment with "what does this code exercise?" than kids who are looking for a guided introduction to how to use an Arduino component.

Hackers may disdain documentation. But when you're educational activity a kid, they demand to work from examples. Our kid tester became a whiz at Scratch by following that coding linguistic communication's helpful, curated community, for example.

But Arduino is a big earth, and there aren't nonetheless a lot of resources to show how Snap Circuits fits into it. Elenco's documentation prefers offering completed projects over explaining how to build your own, and its website doesn't offering a customs to explore, like the ones both LittleBits and Lego accept created.

The Snapino kit is an inexpensive, durable fashion to get into Arduino hardware programming. But it's all-time used past an adult who already understands and tin teach Arduino coding, or by a kid who's willing to go out and seek their own coding teaching resource.