miniTesla: build electronics and more

This is the Starter Kit for the miniTesla solderless electronic building system. It has over 100 components and a printed instruction booklet with 47 experiments. It includes all the necessary tools and components to complete each circuit. You only need to supply a 9V battery.

In this Starter Kit, we teach electronics by circuit examples rather than the traditional math-heavy approach. In fact, there is no math in the instruction book. We immediately start with small but interesting circuits and short explanations of how they work. This encourages experimentation and emphasizes a playful...

This pegboard is 192 mm x 128 mm (7.6" x 5") large which is a bit smaller than half letter size and made from clear 1/8" thick acrylic. Additionally, you will receive four M4x20 mm long hex spacers made from nylon and four M4 matching nylon screws. These spacers function as feet for the board.

The board has 230 holes to accept our spring contacts and it can be mechanically linked to Lego bricks and Lego technic components. In the Lego raster, it is 16 x 24 large. Its shorter side is exactly half the length of a Lego baseplate which is 32 x 32.

Please see the free miniTesla manual for details on how this electronic...

These are the crucial miniTesla spring contacts. They are the connecting elements that allow mechanical as well as electrical connection of electric components. This package includes 20 of them.

They are inserted in 5 mm holes of pegboards about 1/8" (~3 mm) thick. They can be inserted and removed with your fingers but a better removal tool is a 1.75 mm (No. 0) crochet hook. Please refer to the manual for details.

To clamp wires use your fingers or our compression tool.

These spring contacts also fit perfectly into half-height (thin) Lego technic beams. One can construct a little pegboard purely from thin Lego...

This is the getting started guide for the miniTesla solderless electronic prototyping system. Learn the basics of how to build, develop, test, and disassemble circuits, and how to mechanically connect them to the world of Lego.

miniTesla is a new electronics prototyping system based on an ingenious spring contact originally developed by Philips in the 1960s. This contact provides mechanic as well as electric connectivity. We have further improved the original system by eliminating the need for carrier boards for discrete transistors, and by adding additional ways to connect components providing three...