I was putting together a small list of resources for a friend of hardware projects that don't take any soldering and here they are for you! NOTE: I haven’t tried all of these, so go at your own risk. And if you have any suggestions, PRs are welcome!

Paper craft/scrapbooking:


Chibitronics:

These products are so cute and accessible for scrapbooking, card making, crafting in general. Store by Jie Qi:

Sparkfun:

  • Sketchbook circuits: I haven’t tried this one but it looks really cool/cute! Comes with a conductive ink pen and some small components, sensors meant to be attached to paper. I’m a bit skeptical of conductive ink pens as I’ve heard they’re quite finicky though.


Sewable Electronics:

  • Lilypad Arduino: This kit comes with a couple of great projects for e-sewing. The microcontroller here come pre-programmed which is awesome for people who are newer to programming, or newer to hardware /and/ programming. It also provides a nice challenge if you want to edit the code that comes pre-programmed.
  • FLORA: If you want to buy the individual pieces I have a write up here with all the relevant links to the materials you would need, a bit more work is needed for this one because they don’t come pre-programmed, but in general I’ve supplied code for them in my previous post
  • FLORA/Gemma starter packs: These are perfect starter packs for the FLORA and Gemma respectively but they look like they’re sold out at the moment. In general if you’re not doing anything too complicated the Gemma is a really accessible first microcontroller, however it can be a bit tricky to get to play nicely with the Arduino IDE in my experience. To get something up and running quickly with it you can simply stitch out from vOut, and that runs a steady current without needing to be programmed.