About

We (family of four with two kids age 4&7) enjoy building and creating things and have lately started to dive deeper into electronics (an old hobby of mine that has been dormant for a few decades while working as software developer). This site describes a number of projects in various stages of completion that we have taken on or are considering.

The name of this site, nokit, or No Kit, comes from the idea that learning is best done by figuring things out. That is, instead of following step-by-step instructions and a premade plan, start with a general idea of what the result should look like and work towards that (while using other projects as inspiration). It will take longer of course, but the journey will be more instructive and satisfactory.

However, I’m by no mean a fundamentalist about doing everything from scratch. Many projects use microcontrollers and high level integrated circuits even where it would be possible to use only discrete components or simpler ICs. I think there’s a place for both bottom-up and top-down learning, not everything has to be done in the order it might be presented in a text book - sometimes it’s better to be able to move on with the current project and come back for a deep dive later1. The goal is to do projects that are fun, contain some interesting aspect or new idea each, and collectively build up to a thorough understanding of electronics and computing.

Project status

  • idea: Anything not started, from a sketch-on-a-napkin to initial design.
  • in progress: Projects we are currently building. While we try to not have too many things going at he same time (see below about completion), there are inevitable delays waiting for deliveries and motivation might come and go.
  • abandoned: Some ideas just don’t work out, or turned out to be too expensive or require difficult-to-get components or tools.
  • completed: There is considerable value in completing things, both as motivation to go the last mile and to celebrate accomplishments. On the other hand, nothing is ever perfect and everything can be improved upon. So instead of everything being in an indefinite “in progress” state, many projects will have multiple versions that incrementally adds features or explores different directions.

  1. For example, using an arduino + nrf24 makes it easy to remote control just about anything without having to spends weeks understanding radio signals, oscillators, mixing, signal encoding, etc.. Once the desire to understand those parts has been sparked, we can start building crystal oscillators and simple R/C circuits as dedicated projects to fill in the gap. ↩︎