The pentabug is a small microcontroller soldering project. It's especially suited for young hackers and beginners of all ages. Assembly requires no prior soldering skills and can be accomplished - with a little help for the tricky parts - by children old enough to savely hold a soldering iron (thats about 7 years and up).
At the event Datenspuren 2012 nearly 80 kits from our first production run of 100 PCBs have been successfully assembled with just one bug in need of special treatment for a controller mounted the wrong way. Have a look at our slides in german from the accompanying presentation. A video of this session will be available soon. Meanwhile you can watch this video of Frank and his sons beeing interviewed at our workshop table.
Img. 1: A slightly advanced prototype version of the bug with single layer pcb.
Img. 2: The top layer view of the Version 1.0 production board (two layer pcb).
Img. 3: Version 1.0 schematics (high resolution image).
