Friday, May 6, 2016

Kano Kit

I recently received a Raspberry Pi 3 kit from Kano (kano.me) and thought I should give it a review.
The kit includes:
      ●  Raspberry Pi model 3
      ●  8GB microSD card preloaded with Kano OS, projects and games
      ●  Wireless keyboard with touchpad
      ●  Case with built-in speaker and LEDs
      ●  HDMI cable 
      ●  Power supply and cable
      ●  Wifi adapter
      ●  Illustrated user guide with stencils and stickers



The cost is $150 and as you would expect for that price, the quality is very good. I especially like the keyboard. Since this was a v3 Pi, the Wifi adapter was redundant, but that's OK - it will get used on another system. The documentation provides a detailed and illustrated, step by step guide to setting up the system, It is suitable for a very young user and that is obviously the target audience for this kit.

The cover to the case has a small speaker that doesn't appear to be amplified. There are, however, a couple of PCA9685 chips that are connected to the I2C bus and allow control of the LEDs using PWM. I will create some code to experiment with these and see what they're capable of. It would be really nice if the LEDs were RGB, but they appear to be simple blue LEDs.