Here's Johnny! Introducing the Johnny-Five Inventor's Kit
See what you can do with the Tessel 2 and some imagination!
This is a guest post from Jory Burson, COO of Bocoup, our partners in the creation of the awesome new Johnny-Five Inventor's Kit!
Browsing all the great products and kits on SparkFun is something of a pastime for us here at Bocoup. We like to let our imaginations run wild, thinking of all the cool devices we could build, and how we might connect with and control these devices with code and even a web interface. The Johnny-Five Inventor’s Kit (J5IK) was born out of that imagination, and we are thrilled to share it with you today.
Johnny-Five is a robotics and Internet of Things (IoT) platform that makes it possible for users to quickly build whole projects from start to finish using JavaScript, the language of the web. Johnny-Five is the go-to kit for JavaScript-based hardware projects, allowing you the freedom to build, grow and experiment with diverse JavaScript libraries of your choice. It’s a robust, thoroughly tested open source tool that helps ensure your code behaves consistently across 30+ supported boards and microcontrollers.
Johnny-Five has grown from a passion project into a tool for inspiring learning and creativity in people of all ages and backgrounds, from all across the world. That’s why we’re honored to have partnered with SparkFun to create a kit that reflects the vision that creativity and programming are skills accessible to all.
A reconbot built with the Edison and Johnny-Five
The Johnny-Five Inventor’s Kit provides all the components you’ll need to start building web-connected devices with JavaScript, a new, yet powerful, language in the hardware development world. It’s the first kit to feature the Tessel 2, a mighty single-board computer with on-board WiFi and first-class command line tools.
All hail the Tessel 2!
In addition to a charger, breadboard, jumper wires and resistors, you’ll get:
- SparkFun Motor Driver
- SparkFun Soil Moisture Sensor (with Screw Terminals)
- SparkFun BME280 Breakout (with Headers)
- 16x2 Character LCD - White on Black (with Headers)
- Seven-Segment Display
- Hobby Gearmotor (Pair)
- Shift Register
- Magnetic Door Switch Set
- Mini Photocell
- Switch (SPDT)
- Red, Blue, Yellow, and Green Tactile Buttons
- Red, Blue, Yellow, and Green LEDs
- RGB LED
- Trimpot, 10K
The J5IK will ship with an online, 14-experiment guide, so you can start interacting quickly with all the buttons, switches and sensors through Johnny-Five’s easy-to-use API. If you happen to get stuck, or just want to brainstorm project ideas or problems to solve, there’s a vibrant community of Johnny-Five developers here to help at johnny-five.io, in addition to the top-notch support you get from SparkFun.
We’ll also be releasing a series of tutorials here on SparkFun to demonstrate how you can use the kit to build things like a Reconbot and a plant monitor. Scroll down on SparkFun's home page and subscribe to the weekly newsletter to get notified of new tutorials and the latest features and news about Johnny-Five. And, of course, we want to know what you decide to make! Let us know here, on Twitter or on our Gitter channel. Happy making :)
Use the SparkFun soil moisture sensor to alert you when your plants are getting sad and need a bit of water to cheer up ... and progress to much more complex projects!
Stay tuned for our next blog post, which will delve more deeply into the experiments in the new Johnny-Five Inventor's Kit guide and what you can do with this kit!
