The Idiotware Shield is a learning platform for quickly bringing to life hundreds of Arduino projects, whether you’re a novice or expert. The Idiotware Shield is the Swiss Army Knife of Arduino shields, with plenty of integrated inputs and outputs and options for connectivity and expansion.
For every day of this crowdfunding campaign, we’re going to publish a new project showing how the Idiotware Shield simplifies creating awesome Arduino projects. Here we go!
If there are specific demos you’d like to see, please let us know!
The Idiotware Shield is for anyone who wants to quickly bring their IoT ideas to life with minimum hassle and expense.
To make sure we got it right, we spent over a year testing the Idiotware Shield with more than 300 students, most of them in middle school and some as young as nine years old. With the Idiotware Shield, the students quickly got to the core of their ideas, without being distracted by wiring, bulky stacks of multiple shields, or piles of datasheets. See below for more information on our development process.
We believe in open source and have made everything about the Idiotware Shield open source:
Because everything is open source, you can use the Idiotware Shield with a huge number of other tools, such as:
The shield itself is ready to use with any supported Arduino board.
The Idiotware Shield has four expansion ports dedicated to specific modules you can buy as add-ons:
For backers who wish to program the bundled ESP8266-01 module, software and programming support is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS.
You can use the Idiotware Shield with your own Arduino board, or you can get an Arduino as part of this campaign. Any pledge level (see the list to the right) that includes an Arduino comes with:
| Idiotware | Grove Starter Kit V3.0 | 1Sheeld | TinyLab | Evive | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | $45 | $49.90 | $54.90 | $69 | $109 |
| Smart RGB LED | Onboard | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional |
| SD Card | Plug and Play | Optional | Optional | Onboard | Onboard |
| Wi-Fi* | Plug and Play | Optional | Onboard | Plug and Play | Plug and Play |
| Mesh Radio* | Plug and Play | Optional | Optional | Plug and Play | Plug and Play |
| IR Receiver | Onboard | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional |
| Temperature Sensor | Onboard | Onboard | Onboard | Onboard | Onboard |
| Light Sensor | Onboard | Onboard | Optional | Onboard | Onboard |
| Bluetooth* | Plug and Play | Optional | Onboard | Plug and Play | Plug and Play |
| OTA Programming | Onboard | Optional | Optional | Optional | Onboard |
| Low Power Display* | Plug and Play | Optional | Optional | Onboard | Onboard |
| TouchPad | Onboard | Optional | Onboard | Onboard | Onboard |
| Push Button | Onboard | Onboard | Onboard | Onboard | Onboard |
| Potentiometer | Onboard | Onboard | Optional | Onboard | Onboard |
| Digital Expansion | Onboard | Onboard | Optional | Optional | Onboard |
| Analog Expansion | Onboard | Onboard | Optional | Optional | Onboard |
| Size | 71 x 63 mm | Larger | Similar | 4x Larger | 4x Larger |
| Third Party Software Integration | Excellent | Extremely Limited | Excellent | Excellent | Not Enough Data |
* Available as an add-on module
With the Idiotware Shield, you can make its on-board LEDs shine, blink, change colors, and dance to the beat of the on-board multi-tone buzzer.
Integrated on-board the Idiotware Shield are environmental sensors, like temperature and ambient light, and human interfaces, like switches and a touch sensor.
You can query and process the Shield’s sensor data and control the Shield’s outputs over Wi-Fi using a cloud server or over Bluetooth using a phone. The Shield can log data (offline) to an SD card (up to 8 GB), using the integrated microSD card socket, to be retrieved manually or as soon as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connectivity becomes available.
Our journey building the Idiotware Shield started when we built a very basic prototyping shield, which was named the Curiosity Gym shield v0.1.
Some of the projects the students prototyped with the v0.1 of the shield include a chess clock and a security system that sounds an alarm when someone passes through a laser beam, a.k.a. the laser maze.
After the quick prototyping phase, students used coding techniques to reduce the size of their project as a second iteration. We very quickly realized that we had to bring in communication interfaces (Wi-Fi, mesh radio, and Bluetooth), along with a low power display to the Shield.
Produced by Curiosity Gym in Mumbai, India.
Sold and shipped by Crowd Supply.
Buy the Idiotware Shield at retail price. Includes one Idiotware Shield.
All four add-on modules: OLED display module, HC-05 Bluetooth module, NRF24L01 mesh networking module, and pre-programmed ESP-01 Wi-Fi module. Idiotware Shield NOT included.
Includes one Idiotware Shield and all four add-on modules: OLED display module, HC-05 Bluetooth module, NRF24L01 mesh networking module, and pre-programmed ESP-01 Wi-Fi module. Does not include Arduino board or accessories.
Curiosity Gym is a leading makerspace in Mumbai that helps enthusiasts build prototypes. Curiosity Gym also runs Innovation Hubs in schools and colleges to awaken curiosity and help catalyze making, innovation, design thinking, and entrepreneurship across all age groups.
