Reviewer:
Thomas Harrington
from Colorado Springs, CO United States
This kit is a cool idea but the design makes it inappropriate for people just getting started with soldering. The battery pack solders onto the bottom of the board. If you don't get the leads trimmed very, very closely it's difficult to get it on due to leads sticking through. And, if it doesn't work right the first time, a bunch of the solder joints are completely hidden and impossible to check.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Simple but you can learn a lot
September 13, 2011
Reviewer:
bill
from mountain view, CA United States
The kit's pretty easy to build, and the directions tell you what order to add each part in so earlier parts don't get in your way when you're soldering, so it's a good learning project.
And it's shiny and blinky and the blinking's distance-sensitive! I drilled an extra hole in mine so I could put it on a string as a necklace. When the battery's mostly used up, the LED only lights up in red, not the other colors, which tells you things about the different voltage behaviour of LED colors.
But you can do more than that - it has a 6-pin ICSP interface that you can program with an AVR programmer or wire up to your Arduino, and includes the source code so you can reprogram the blinking patterns if you want, change the distance sensitivity or the speed or whatever. There's a lot more depth to it than a simple 555-timer blinker.
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0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Very simple yet exciting
December 2, 2010
Reviewer:
Calvert
from Scottsdale, AZ United States
Forget trippy, imagine a group of 10 middle school students standing in a darkened room squeezing together to wave their hands over a table of little lights, laughing and exclaiming "Dude, dude, that one's mine, that one's mine" while the lights change colors.
My middle school students had never done any kind of electronics project before and they were able, with only basic instruction, to finish this project. It is very satisfying and a great teaching tool.
Their only complaint was that it didn't change colors every time they swiped their hand over, it only reset the sequence to red and continued from there. This may be because of a mistake they made though.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
My First Soldering Experience
February 26, 2010
Reviewer:
Jeff
from Mountain View, CA United States
I put this kit together at HackerDojo in under Mitch's guidance. It was easy and fun to learn soldering with this simple kit. The Trippy RGB Waves kit was a great first project and it has inspired me to build some more kits with my newly acquired soldering skills!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Trippy LED kit
October 17, 2009
Reviewer:
Tweedle
from Owosso, MI United States
Put this kit together and I guess it works correctly. I thought it was more like the circuit that EMS labs uses in their interactive LED tables. Boy, was I ever wrong. Thought I could put a bunch together and make something like it. Much too expensive to do any such thing. As I understand it, this circuit is digital whereas the EMS one is analog. Huge difference. Oh well, live and learn.
Nice idea, not for beginners 
Simple but you can learn a lot 
Very simple yet exciting 
Trippy LED kit 
