Just in time for Christmas, ebay and Amazon seller 4tronix have developed a cute little GPIO add-on board for the Pi. It has a ring of LEDs and two switches meaning you can use it in a PiGlow-type way but also interactively. They suggest several projects on their Kickstarter project page and there are a lot of possibilities with something as simple and well put-together as this. It requires some simple soldering but this is exactly the kind of low-cost easy-access project you could use with your kids to teach them soldering. 4tronix have promised a suite of example scripts and apps written in Scratch and Python to get you started with the programming.

I’ve backed it and, at £8 for the earlybird deal and £9 for the regular board, I recommend that you support this UK company and pledge too!

I am not affiliated with 4tronix – I’m just a very happy past customer!

Read more about the board at Kickstarter