SnapCircuits are electronics kits designed for kids (although adults have fun with them, too!). Components, such as resistors, capacitors, motors, transistors, and LEDs are mounted on plastic bases that snap together. The manuals that come with the kits describe a number of different circuits that are both fun and educational.

Now, for adults there’s littleBits. The website has a short video on the concept and this text:

littleBits is an opensource library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together. With a growing number of available modules, littleBits aims to move electronics from late stages of the design process to its earliest ones, and from the hands of experts, to those of artists, makers and designers.

Stay tuned, design files, schematics and instructions will be online soon

Ambitious, no? I do like it that the designs will be open-source and the way the modules connect magnetically, but without more detail it’s hard to say how easy or difficult it will be to use these things.

There’s also a question of whether or not there will be processor “bits” and how these processors are to be programmed. I can’t imagine they haven’t thought of that yet, but there’s such little detail on the website, it’s hard to say for sure. If they’re smart, and Bdeir is an MIT graduate so presumably she is, they’ll adopt one of the small processor designs, such as the Arduino, that’s become popular in the maker community.

Anyway, they have a mailing list, that I just subscribed to, and hopefully there will be more details forthcoming soon.  I’ll update when I know more.