Chinese stm32 development kits in lunchbox style pachages with cables, etc. EDU

[cdev]

Thse look like they would be good gifts for fairly advanced kids learning electronics..

https://world.tmall.com/item/21725199723.htm

https://world.tmall.com/item/27106256948.htm?

Might make good gifts outside of china, too?

[janekm]

They also come with a ton of online educational material (text and video). All in Chinese of course...

[Kjelt]

This would be the uC equivalent of the 200 project analog/digital electronic boxes you could get in the past. The biggest problem nowadays is to get kids interested in these. The chinese are going to beat our society in the very near future when their kids want to become engineers and scientist while ours want to become managers  , managers of what, empty buildings?

[chickenHeadKnob]

Hmmm, a puzzle it is. The title includes the phrase avr stm32 but shows a 40 pin dip in a zif socket. There are no  40 pin dip stm32's. There is of course the possibility of an adapter board like those stm32f103 "blue pill" but I could see none pictured. It looks like an AVR only system.  It would help if a native speaker could decode how this is an stm32 development tool.

[^_^]

I thought it's pretty common for electronics shops to design their own edu boards like these.

http://electropark.pl/edu/438-zestaw-z-plytka-edu-are0034.html

btw: http://electropark.pl/edu/8434-elenco-200-w-1-laboratorium-projektowe.html

[alm]

Looks to me (with my non-existent Chinese skills) that it is primarily designed for the STC 8051. The label for the socket in one of the pictures says something about needing an adapter board for other MCUs according to Google Translate, so I imagine you have to buy something like the blue pill.

I see no mention of it shipping with anything but the 8051, so I imagine you have to buy any ARM or AVR (adapter board) it might support separately. The programmer also appears to only support the 8051.

[amyk]

The title of the second link roughly translates to "51MCU development board support avr stm32 MCU education board development board experiment board", and it is primarily for 8051s.

I'm not sure what/why it's supplied with goo, however.

[cdev]

I originally wrote "good for ...- meaning to have some more text there about how it might be education-friendly but it got truncated, very sorry!



Quote from: amyk on Today at 09:16:10

The title of the second link roughly translates to "51MCU development board support avr stm32 MCU education board development board experiment board", and it is primarily for 8051s.

I'm not sure what/why it's supplied with goo, however.

[cdev]

A while back I asked a Chinese-born friend about this general strategy for electronics education in China (bringing up how many inexpensive parts and devices were available there and contrasting it to the situation with test equipment in the US.)

 However I didnt get the answer I was expecting.

She was adamant that Chinese parents and students put SO much energy into preparing (students) for the all important college placement exam - which focus on the things taught in textbooks - and core subjects- period- and she insisted that everything else is squeezed out for people of educational age.  This exam is apparently the single thing that will make or break most Chinese young people's entire lives.

In other words she sounded like they would not have time to pursue an electronics hobby, or anything else, being so oriented towards doing well on these tests.

This is because as she put it the tests were necessary so the system could focus all its efforts on preparing the best students for their future lives, and many others - the vast majority of students, were in many cases left behind.

She agreed that experiential education was good but her reaction seemed to me to be saying that in China, for young people - below college age, that was like an impossible dream, something to be pursued on some other, less competitive planet, far away from Earth.

[jaromir]

Similar (the same?) items are to be bought in more accessible sources, like ebay
http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Development-Board-HC6800-12864LCD-Kit-Multifunction-For-ARM-AVR-51-MCU-UC913-/112271636022?epid=2116795305&hash=item1a23e93636:g:bGgAAOSw241YXKc6
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Development-Board-Learning-Board-For-Stc89c52-51-MCU-for-Beginner-Start-Learner-/253013699563?hash=item3ae8caabeb:g:wjgAAOSwnHZYY7pl

or aliexpress
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/PLC-machine-learning-PLC-controllerPLCindustrial-control-board-development-board-industrial-control-programming-experiment-board/32241823837.html

[Mr. Scram]

This would be the uC equivalent of the 200 project analog/digital electronic boxes you could get in the past. The biggest problem nowadays is to get kids interested in these. The chinese are going to beat our society in the very near future when their kids want to become engineers and scientist while ours want to become managers  , managers of what, empty buildings?

Do you make a point of complaining in every topic?

Lighten up. Even though it is very popular to give young folks a hard time and there is plenty of evidence of people being stupid to back those claims up, Youtube and the rest of the internet is also full of amazing projects that the younger generation started and finished themselves. Thanks to easily accessible technology, people start making great content at ever younger ages and develop a wide range of skills. Not just the projects are often very nice, the videos they make to present these project to the world also tend to have a ridiculous production value.

[cdev]

People will have a lot of free time, like all their time.

Because those cute little lunchbox machines will do all the old jobs, and the new jobs will all go to members of the owners family or people they owe favors to, like the other wealthy peoples children. 

People should rid themselves of the misconception that by buying their kids electronics toys and empowering them with the skills they will have a lot of fun with, that they somehow are making up for the PhD they cant afford to help them get. or the multi-year internship (or underpaid work as a guest worker in a rich country) they cant afford to help them take, it doesn't, it doesnt even come close.

On the other hand it may help them avoid becoming another statistic sucked in by an unfair and corrupt society's many and growing problems.

Electronics is a good, inexpensive and fun way to keep peoples brains occupied and growing for their entire lives.

[Kjelt]

Do you make it a sport to complain in every topic?

Sorry just my frustration that my stepson rather spents hours looking at his ipad how other people do things than to do any of it himself.
I see this alot because his friends have the same issues.
When I ask him do you like to learn to solder, nah I rather watch you do it.
With woodworking the same, passive entertainment. Then there was this endyear party all kids now go to the highschool and they presented what the kids wrote earlier that year in an assignment what they wanted to do and become later in life. With the exception of four out of 25 kids on that class they all wanted to become rich stars and live with sportscars in AbuDabi, I mean WTF? What about doctors, electriciens, explorers, astronauts I don't care but anything better than this. I stop the rant for now 

[^_^]

I think it's the thing of our modern times, a certain drawback to technological advancement.
You get too many options. There are more apps and games than you can ever try. More movies and tv-shows than you can ever watch.
I was born in '91 and for me it would be already futile if I wanted to go through every PC game out there.

BUT certain kids seem to be immune to that shallow consumption.
They want to know how things work. They don't really want to consume, they want to create.
I was one of those kids and I'd take my toys apart to try to understand how they work
I think you are born this way and I'm optimistic that those kids will keep coming anyway.

[cdev]

Well, the well being that people in developed countries enjoyed in the past is under attack as an artifact of protectionism, and demonized.  In its place we are getting "the cleansing disinfectant of competition" as former WTO DG Michael Moore put it a few years ago.  Neoliberalism should be seen as a backlash against the Enlightenment of sorts, as well as an ideology born out of Frederick Taylor's "Scientific Management" which really is a kind of cult of "efficiency", which attempts to subject all of society as a quest for increased profits and weighs all measures, all laws, all beings existence against that goal. It frames progress as a progress against people, and human rights, instead of trying to use technology to improve peoples lives.

This necessitates a negation of the status of anybody who is "needed" - especially targeted are professions, which are being reframed as "service providers" interchangeable standardized, internationalized, commoditized cogs in a machine, to be pitted against one another in a quest for increased profitability.

Also, all national dialogues between favored and historically disadvantaged groups are deemed solved and are subsumed by these new goals of increasing "efficiency" at the cost of all else.

All that said, maybe this will be the glimpse of he abyss that we all need to bring our minds to focus on where we are going. Hopefully that place is the stars, together.

Maybe this is the century we also evolve to a higher level of economics understanding, beyond our current stupidities.

The smartest people I know are a lot like kids in that their minds just kept growing. Society is doing its best to prevent that but despite those efforts thinking is increasing. Technology toys are good for people of all ages because they challenge us to solve problems which lead to newer challenges.

[Mr. Scram]

I think it's the thing of our modern times, a certain drawback to technological advancement.
You get too many options. There are more apps and games than you can ever try. More movies and tv-shows than you can ever watch.
I was born in '91 and for me it would be already futile if I wanted to go through every PC game out there.

BUT certain kids seem to be immune to that shallow consumption.
They want to know how things work. They don't really want to consume, they want to create.
I was one of those kids and I'd take my toys apart to try to understand how they work
I think you are born this way and I'm optimistic that those kids will keep coming anyway.

It's really not that bad. People love to complain and moan, but it just shows they are near or over 30 years old Even though children nowadays have to contend with a lot of distractions, they also have a world of opportunities that were absolutely unthinkable not too long ago. Information that was terribly scarce and required a huge amount of effort to dig up can now be accessed by a few clicks, often in a palatable and amusing format. Children tackle projects that were a challenge even for advanced people not too long ago and not just because things have become more modular. Information is presented in so many forms that there is always one that suits your learning style and getting stuck does not have to be a deal breaker any more.

I remember Dave talking about his huge electronics library, which every enthusiast needed to have because you could not get quickly accessible information any other way. Now you can download pretty much any datasheet you want in seconds. People don't need libraries any more, which is a huge advantage is you want to tinker more seriously.

[cdev]

We shouldn't confuse learning opportunities with economic opportunities, especially when they involve something so cheap as electronics. Hardware will keep getting cheaper and cheaper and knowledge will become more widely distributed and the bar for earning money with these skills will continue to rise because 'everybody will be doing it'. Under the current regime, supply abundant=undervalued.

Machines also look more and more like a free workforce - so they can and will have the function of depressing wages below the cost of (human) living. Until they approach zero or even negative wages (pay to work to keep your skills fresh) I think that is already happening.

This is why all the capitalists feel so "entitled" to their race to the bottom on wages in the coming decades and why the concept of a "living wage" is like heresy to them.

They won't even consider it.

[Mr. Scram]

We shouldn't confuse learning opportunities with economic opportunities, especially when they involve something so cheap as electronics. Hardware will keep getting cheaper and cheaper and knowledge will become more widely distributed and the bar for earning money with these skills will continue to rise because 'everybody will be doing it'. Under the current regime, supply abundant=undervalued.

I cannot consider the democratisation of knowledge and learning a bad development. If I were to follow that train of thought, schools should be prohibited, because fewer people will learn relevant things. Obviously, the few that do will live like kings, and the rest will need to grovel for scraps. Throughout history, civilisations have benefited from a better educated population. I don't think there are many examples of the opposite, if any.

[cdev]

We're seeing democratization of a subset of knowledge superimposed on political de-democratisation.

because otherwise, the powerful everywhere think people would just vote their way out of THEIR CONTROL. And they were and are right. So 20-30 years ago they teamed up and started making global changes to make that impossible without dumping the system that they created and starting fresh. Effectively eliminating democracy's core function, that or correcting bad decisions. Now bad decisions and the sell-outs of a nation by just one corrupt government potentially get locked in forever, get locked in forever by trade deals. A trap which will prove impossibly costly for a nation's taxpayers to afford to extricate themselves from.

They didn't tell us about this large scale theft of the planet from its people because they didn't want us to spoil their fun.

Quote from: Mr. Scram on Today at 11:51:45>Quote from: cdev on 2017-08-13, 21:47:31

We shouldn't confuse learning opportunities with economic opportunities, especially when they involve something so cheap as electronics. Hardware will keep getting cheaper and cheaper and knowledge will become more widely distributed and the bar for earning money with these skills will continue to rise because 'everybody will be doing it'. Under the current regime, supply abundant=undervalued.

I cannot consider the democratisation of knowledge and learning a bad development. If I were to follow that train of thought, schools should be prohibited, because fewer people will learn relevant things. Obviously, the few that do will live like kings, and the rest will need to grovel for scraps. Throughout history, civilisations have benefited from a better educated population. I don't think there are many examples of the opposite, if any.

[cdev]

We have to tell ourselves that, I agree, or we would go insane.

So, lets make it so. But right now, the reality we face is that they changed the rules of the game behind our backs and they have us barking up the wrong trees.

Thats what happens in extrinsic fraud. The whole world is an extrinsic fraud right now. A huge fraud on its people.

See the Annex on Financial Services, and Understanding on Commitments in Financial Services.

You'll see that market based solutions are the only ones which are allowed.

Otherwise, governments would be taken before a WTO court for unfairly competing with banks which have allegedly "reasonable expectations" of certain patterns of financial events in countries under certain financial conditions.

In the US, why do you think Dodd-Frank (post 2008 financial services regulation) is being rolled back?
Or the ACA?  (health insurance regulation)

Read the "Standstill" portion of the Understanding. thats whats really behind these roll backs in financial regulation.  There you will also see that it carves all deregulation in stone. It wont be fixable in two or four years.

these kinds of behind the scenes changes are being made all around the world.

[Mr. Scram]

Sorry, fatalism is just not my thing. I don't see the value in enforcing each others downward spiral while pointing at 'them'. If anything is going to change, it will need to start with you. Roll up your sleeves and make things better.

Since I suspect that is not going to happen any time soon and this has nothing to do with cool STM32 kits, I'm out.