Electronic Busy Board is Fun for Kids and Hackers

What happened

While it would surely be possible to implement a gadget like this entirely in hardware, [Andy] took the modern hobbyist approach of offloading some of the task to a collection of carefully arranged ones and zeros. While you may not be familiar with the term “busy board”, you’ve almost certainly seen one.

It’s the sort of toy with a bunch of buttons, switches, and of course LEDs, that are designed to keep young children entertained. As it so buttons, switches, buttons, and LEDs also keep hardware hackers entertained — doubly so if they are the ones designing said busy board in the first place. Last Christmas he decided to scratch build an electronic busy board for his nephew , and while it might not be a terribly complex piece of kit from a technical standpoint, it’s a fantastic multidisciplinary project in that it’s really equal parts hardware and software.