An educational electronic board that costs only $1. An introduction to the Internet of things and robotics.
Making a revolution in education

Designed to be part of the basic list of school supplies for children, the One Dollar Board has the purpose of making children get out of school already knowing programming, as well as learn the basic contents i.e. math, grammar, geography, etc.

The One Dollar Board team introducing the project to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

Special Perks!

Founders 

The goal of this project, is to help anyone,  specially people from developing countries to have access to hardware that allows them to initiate in the Internet of Things(IoT), learn robotics, programming and contribute to revert technological illiteracy. In order to do so, we have developed a Printable Card Board(PCB) that only costs 1USD.

The beginning

This is a board for the world of electronics and programming. It's compatible with popular open source software and free; Arduino / Genuino, comes with an instruction manual printed in itself (on-board).

Giftable

Encourage someone to Hardware Programming

If you are a student, programmer, teacher, or just like robotics and want to make your friends interested in electronics and on the Internet of Things (IoT), now you can gift them without spending a lot and easily introduce them in this universe with a board cheaper than traditional hardware, still with effective results.

Price

What would you do with one dollar?

The One Dollar Board will be sold at an affordable price to anyone in the world (1USD+ shipping), focusing mainly on the developing countries. It contains the basics to start projects and to be functional.

What would you do with one dollar? Want a hint? Why not venture out and discover the programming in a more playful way, with opportunities to work with robotics and the Internet of Things?

Open Source

Free to be copied, distributed and improved

The One Dollar Board was born to be free so, the best way to increase its impact on society is enabling anyone to modify or improve the original version for other commercial or non-commercial applications. It is licensed as an Open Source Hardware http://www.oshwa.org/definition/ and  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

More than 100 volunteers working on the project:

Size

Easy to carry

With a compact design and the size of a credit card, it fits inside your wallet, which makes it ideal to send in an envelope or carry in your pocket.

Guide book and links on board

The card comes with a quick guide book about how to begin to study and to perform the first exercise, avoiding the endless internet searches to get to the first Blink LED running on your device.

With a surprise on step 8…

The door to the knowledge with just one key

The Step 8 is the gateway to tutorials and videos, to enter in the world of electronics and programming. A portal is being build and you can register and have access to the landing page at onedollarboard.org, this portal will be filled with content created by One Dollar Board Team and by users such as videos and tutorials in the future.

50 thousand boards = 50 thousand dollars

To achieve the goal of the first lot, we need $ 50,000 or more, amount that we want to raise using this crowd funding platform.

Designed to be easily accessible. Our goal is to help the development of the countries with the lowest population’s participation rate in electronics and make it affordable to people with limited resources.
One Dollar Board is a Social Business, Inspired by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus.

Settings

Simple and functional

CPU: 8-bit

GPIO (input and output ports): 6

USB Interface: Yes

Memory: Flash 8 kBytes (expandable to 256 kBytes) 

Spaces for expansions: Wifi ESP8266, Memory 24C256, H bridge L293

Voltage: 5V

Indicator Leds: 2

Reset Button: Yes

Fitting Spaces: 4 (compatible with Arduíno UNO or similar)

Quick Guide: The English board comes with a printed guide in other languages.

Sponsors

Do you own a company and want to help us?

There will be available spaces on the board, so potential sponsors can put their logo in the first batch. There are 10 spaces, each one costing 2,000 USD. This money will be used to hire more professionals and also to pay for expenses such as USB ID and media campaign.

Volunteer

Join us and let’s change the world!

If you want to help us to promote, teach courses, organize events, workshops, or engage in the project’s improvement. Please enter the site and register, to know more the project: www.onedollarboard.org

The issue:

To teach programming and electronics nowadays is relatively easy, but requires the purchase of boards like Arduino UNO or similar, which are difficult to buy for all the students in the initiation phase’s course. This situation is even harder in low-income groups. Our solution is to create a platform that will serve to introduce all the students to the world of programming and electronics, at a low cost: $ 1. Once started, you can add components and modules as Wifi and others to continue their study. Soon after get started, if you want to acquire other cards to build a 3D printer, we recommend to buy Arduino / Genuino with more advanced settings.

An applicable example:

(Issue):

To start a programming course in traditional electronics to a class is not cheap. The main barrier is the costs to have programming boards. The challenge of the One Dollar Board (ODB) is to solve this problem. Imagine a room with 30 students. You would need to buy 30 boards at $ 21, and it would cost $ 630. With ODB the cost would be only $ 30, making it very affordable for independent institutions. Besides being an educational project, ODB indirectly becomes a social project, because enables the possibility to learn in an area that is already becoming important at the beginning of the 21st century, where children, youth and adults will have the opportunity to generate income to live. The knowledge does not occupy space, and if it is more accessible, it will have greater impact.

Another example:

NGOs that launch projects to teach programming and electronics in Africa region. The budget to spend on teaching material of these organizations is 1200 dollars. The original cost would be 20 dollar per unit, so they would be able to buy 50 cards for the project including 200 dollars for transportation costs.

The instructor starts the course, but the students cannot take the boards home, so the classes once a week reach a maximum of two classes every 6 months that lasts the course while volunteers are present.

(Solution):

With the One Dollar Board, the organization is able to buy 1000 units at $ 1 each, and spends $ 200 on shipping. In each course or lecture, the students take the boards to home or to school, so they can continue the study on programming and, for 6 months and the instructors will be able to monitor. In total, 1,000 children are reached with the same budget. With all of them registered on the online platform, to watch future projects developed by the public and to continue with those who stand out.

FAQ 

- Which are the prospects of this project? Teachers, public schools, lecturers, NGOs related to education, people who want to learn programming and electronics and anyone who wants to develop their own projects (DIY – do it yourself).

- What is the minimum age to use ODB? At first, since the child is already literate and able to use a computer (on average from 8 or 9 years). In the future, it will be possible to decrease the minimum age with programming in blocks.

- What does it take to get started? A computer that supports the programming interface to run the program, an USB port and an ODB board.

- The IDE is from Arduino? Yes. Initially the Programming Interface (FDI) will be the Arduino, which is license free software and supported by a large community.

- What is the advantage to manufacture a low-cost learning board? The main advantage is to make available to developing countries the necessary material, so they do not get left out of the fourth industrial revolution.

- Why the original name is in English? As English is known as a universal language, that becomes communication easy with several people and enables the translation to other languages.

- Why it has a lot of names, such as "a nut"? The project is called "nut" and its variant in the language of the country. Soon, after the first phase of the project, the entire system will be called "nut", as a symbol, because from a nut seed is born a great nut tree which gives more nuts. And also because on step 1 and 2 is necessary to break the board, and to consume a "nut" is also necessary to break the shell.

- It can be used for various purposes? Yes, from an educational purpose, such as the development of small educational projects, the development of a robot controlled by wi-fi, or as a final product, becoming the cheaper Attyny85 microcontroller of the market.

- From where it will be sent? From China, since China has the logistical support to send it to anywhere in the world at an affordable price.

- How can it costs $ 1? There are a lot of reasons: It is shipped directly from the factory to the end user, it is used a minimum possible number of components for the operation board, with full-scale production, corporate sponsorship for small amounts of subsidy, volunteers at various stages of the project, the will to change the world with a dollar.

- The price of $ 1 includes shipping and import duties (taxes)? It is not included, we always recommend you to buy a considerable amount to get the same shipping costs. It will be paid by the buyer, including also when buying for a third part, in case of making a donation. The import duty or taxes depends of the destination country.

- Can I donate to someone? Yes and we recommend.

- Do you still accept volunteers? Yes, we want to change the world so we need people in several areas, Contacts  onedollarboard@centromaker.com

Our story

One Dollar Board was born in Campus Party #CPBR8 on São Paulo in 2015 with Claudio Olmedo, a Hardware Free activist of Movement Maker in Brazil and founder of Centro Maker (company specialized in manufacturing electronics for Makers).

When he was invited to give a lecture about this theme by Thalis Antunes, in between lectures, emerged the idea of the need to facilitate the dissemination of Open Source Hardware as Arduino, unlike the Open Source Software where you can share information about where and how to download and start the hardware in studies, it gets more complicated.

The first observation was to seek for a way to make a simple board but which has the basics to start the study, asking for Thalis Antunes, who was the first volunteer of the project to make the first PCB, who was invited and received the activist; Another important character was Ezequiel França dos Santos, at the time that Claudio was explaining the idea for Thalis, he said, "Dude, this changes everything, is something to take to the TED (a series of conferences in Europe, Asia and in the Americas by the Sapling foundation with online videos available), imagine if I could give lectures in a school, and give a board to every needy student to take home?" That raised a hope of revolution in the head of Claudio, a way to further popularize this type of learning tool. Ezekiel, in this edition, won the Hackaton of Internet of Things, organized by Telefonica / Vivo.

Following your intuition and experience in electronic boards manufacturing, Claudio made a reverse-budget, and the cost of manufacturing should be 1 dollar, he searched for an economic chip, found some Open Source Hardware projects that use the Atty85 Atmel, that opened up an advantage to the project. In the evening of the same day, they went to Thalis’ apartment where Claudio was staying and began the project. A very important fact for the project was to find the staff that wanted to work as a volunteer without payment. The Centro Maker (where Claudio Olmedo is the CEO – www.centromaker.com) could not reach that price. Many volunteers have offered to help in the following months the project was continuing, but some volunteers have difficulties to continue the project, and because of the lack of time, the project was stopped for a while, until it was taken at the moment the Centro Maker would go through a pre-incubation process in Itaipu Technological Park (PTI) in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, where its members saw an opportunity to continue with the project. After going through the selection, the Centro Maker got the 7th place because the jury saw with skepticism the project, except one who knew the Maker Movement and the importance from this kind of material for the education’s development.

In February 2016, began the registration of new volunteers, already with more experience in project management. The volunteering was critical to the project as it helps to reduce costs.

This electronic programming board has as main objective to become possible for young people from public schools to have access to a low-cost technological equipment and then begin to learn programming in an educational way, to improve reasoning, creativity and memory through simple applications in a practical environment, stimulating to explore new frontiers in learning, preparing young people to enter into a new world, where technology is starting to be part of the reality of these new generations.