More Pi?

It’s a story we’re all familiar with: Two hungry young geeks meet in a garage to collaborate on something no one has ever seen. Their first product is a humble circuit board, hardly useful to anyone who isn’t also a geek. But it ultimately leads to devices that change the world.

Of course I’m talking about the two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak. But I could just as easily be talking about two folks you probably haven’t heard of.

Alex Klein and Yonatan Raz-Fridman are the co-founders of Kano, a brand-new startup that’s looking to bring the ideals of early Apple — and the Homebrew Computer Club that spawned Apple and many of the other early computer titans — to a new generation.

The Apple I was essentially a circuit board with a power supply. To turn it into a working computer, you had to add your own case, keyboard, monitor, and other essential bits. The $129 Kano kit is what a lot of early Apple I users might have wanted. It has the computer circuit board (the Raspberry Pi, which is widely available), but Kano also provides the case, wireless keyboard, WiFi dongle, cables, and Linux OS on a memory card. It’s a nearly complete computer. (You’ll still have to add the monitor yourself.)

The problem is not that kids have too much technology in their lives, says co-founder Klein. It’s that there are so few opportunities to tinker with it. Hermetically sealed tablets and smartphones are wonderful devices that let you do amazing things, but you can’t really mess around with them. You can’t even replace the batteries.

The idea behind Kano was to create a computer that’s so easy to build that an 8-year-old can do it. And then, once he’s built it, he can learn how to program it.

I think I Kano
So the other day, for the first time in my long career in tech journalism, I built a computer. It took me about 15 minutes from unboxing to booting up, half of which I spent trying to figure out how to turn it on and connect the keyboard. (If I’d had an 8-year-old nearby, I’m sure I’d have gotten it done in half the time.)

It’s amazingly simple: Slide the circuit board into one half of the clear plastic case; the other half snaps onto it with a click. Attach the speaker cable to pins on the motherboard and plug it into the sound jack. Insert the 8 GB SD card containing the OS into the memory slot, plug the WiFi and Bluetooth dongles into the USB slots, and then attach your own monitor via the HDMI cable.

When you’re done, you’ve got a fully functioning, Internet-ready computer about the size of a Sony Walkman cassette player, if you’re old enough to remember those.

But that is really the least interesting bit about the Kano (kah-no), which is named for Kanō Jigorō, the inventor of judo. What makes this more than just a simple assembly project is the open-source software that comes with it (which is a modified version of Debian Linux).

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