Tinylab: A Prototyping Board for Everyone Is on Indiegogo Now!

Bosphorus Mechatronics that is a tech startup from Istanbul launched an Indiegogo campaign that called Tinylab, at 11th January. Tinylab is an open-source Arduino-based new way of prototyping that better than using a breadboard with jumper cables or stacking Arduino shields together. It's aesthetic, convenient and easy to use. The campaign has already reached 17 percent of goal in 24 hours.

Campaign Link: http://igg.me/at/tinylab

About Bosphorus Mechatronics

Bosphorus Mechatronics was founded by five engineering students who are very interested in robotics and embedded platforms and also strong friends in 2010, Istanbul, Turkey. We started to make circuits, electronic modules and do-it-yourself robot kits. After one year we opened an online retail store is ‘robotistan’ that we show and sell our designs and other products like Arduino, Raspberry etc. Now, Robotistan sells needs of makers' and make their electronic projects possible in Turkey. Also, we have been establishing a makerspace that named ‘Makerhane’ means ‘maker’s house’ in Turkish. We are loving making stuff using Arduino and prototype our ideas. Also, we are trying hard to help the maker movement reach all around the country. We believe in that the maker and open source revolutions will solve the future problems of the world.

The Story of Tinylab

As a group of makers, tinkers, inventors, we love making prototypes and actualize our ideas. Arduino is our hero, we mostly design around it and we realized that we use some common components with it generally. Every time, we need to make same circuits to display, send or sense something. At this times, using a breadboard turns a torture and using stackable shields doesn't serve the purpose generally. You need more than three shields but you can't stack more them together due to pin overlaps. So we think the Tinylab can be the painkiller. So we designed it, used it, loved it and can't wait for sharing it with the community.

About Tinylab

Tinylab is for makers, prototypers, students, engineers and any other people these love to create. Because it contains most of the popular and common pieces of electronics, circuits, modules, sensors etc. You can get started with programming your idea and hardware prototyping with the Arduino programming language. You can learn programming microcontrollers making applications with it.

Tinylab can be the new instrument of school laboratories. It can be programmed with Scratch that is a perfect fit for kids. Also, it's compatible with complex development environments like Visual Studio, Atmel Studio and Eclipse.

Tinylab is also a USB Human Interface Device. It can be like such as a keyboard, mouse, game controller.

Tinylab is an Internet of things master. There are sockets for popular IoT modules these are the 5 dollars Wi-Fi module ESP8266 and the 3 dollars RF transceiver module nRF24l01. Also, there are sockets for Bluetooth and Xbee modules. You can control integrated relay on Tinylab from your mobile phone or tweet data from temperature and light sensor with Tinylab.

About Crowdfunding in Turkey

When we look the technology projects from Turkey at the popular international crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, there are only two of twenty-two projects reached their goal and they raised only 12.482$. We can see lots of technology projects these are successful in our country and have big potential but they don't share their work with the world via crowdfunding. We believe the reason that THERE AREN'T ANY SUCCESS STORY that encourages them from our country. So while we setting up our campaign, we hope that we will be a good story for others.

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Tags: #crowdfunding, #indiegogo, #istanbul, #kickstarter, #live, #make, #maker, #news, #prototype, #seed, #start-up, #startup, #tech, #turkey


Okan Saraçoğlu
Hardware Engineer, Bosphorus Mechatronics