“Well worth the money and a good little starter kit. I think it won’t be long before we need more sparkles. Testing this out with a view to buying a set for an after school club for my primary children. Hoping to find more projects online to give them inspiration”
“I picked this over other similar microcontrollers such as the flora/gemma (& neopixels) as they seemed a little more complex to setup and the codebug was out of stock at the time.
As another reviewer mentioned, I also ordered more sparkles and a ton of crocodile leads to get going.
I wanted an easy way to make a low-powered RGB light setup for my fish tank, and with a little tinkering, the crumble is great! I hadn't used any other programming software like this before, but after seeing a couple of examples on the redfern website it took me about 5 minutes to get up and running.
I feel that with a few additions to the software it could be even better, but for now, having huge chunks of sparkle commands will have to do!
So far I have programmed the crumble to alter the sparkle colours, cycle commands when a button is pressed and change the brightness according to a lux meter crumb (4tronix). Once I'm happy with the setup I plan on sealing the sparkles into a piece of clear tubing (to make them waterproof as they are not on their own!). I would highly recommend and think it is a brilliant bit of kit- especially when getting kids -and bigger kids! into programming.
My only reservations are that the sparkles are a little bulky for my purposes, and again, there is room for improvement with the software to make it even more intuitive (like either adding more controls for all sparkles at once, or adding a copy/paste or clone function so that programming is quicker...).”
“It's very easy to get started with Crumble but....the starter kit isn't enough! Already ordered more sparkles. The drag and drop blocks with their similarity to Scratch will make it easy for younger pupils to get started, and especially so if they have experienced Scratch. This will make a great little project kit for the primary age pupils at after-school club. I particularly like the crafting projects on the Redfern website (Christmas tree and colour-changing lamp) which will make great starting points and will certainly lead to lots of interesting and fun projects. The programming is a little like working with Arduino Flora boards - create the program, upload to Crumble then disconnect from computer; the addition of power makes the program run. Looking forward to buying a few more starter kits to use at Computer Club. I think (hope!) the opportunity to create and craft projects like the Christmas tree and lamp will appeal to girls.”
