This page will introduce the key electronics that drive our electronics range of this multidisciplinary lab.
The devices listed here are among the world's most popular devices for studying and implementing hands-on electronics projects. Having past examples tested and wired together in projects, these devices will each be found in a functional example project between 2026 and 2027.
| Device | Type | subcategory | Model | Diagram |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ESP8266 | microcontrollers | digital | ESP8266 | ✅ |
| ESP32 | microcontrollers | digital | ESP32 | ✅ |
| ESPWROOM | microcontrollers | digital | ESPWROOM | ✅ |
| soil moisture | sensor, analog | analog | LM393 | ✅ |
| buzzer, 4kHz | sensor, analog | analog | T1438-TWT-R | ✅ |
| IR motion | sensor, analog | analog | AM312 | ✅ |
| micro limit switch | sensor, analog | analog | KW12-3 | ✅ |
| float switch | sensor, analog | analog | ZP4510 | ✅ |
| temp-humidity SHT31 | sensor, digital | digital | SHT31 | ✅ |
| ambient light | sensor, digital | digital | TLS2591 | ✅ |
| thermistor | sensor, digital | digital | DS18B20 | ✅ |
| thermistor breakout | sensor, digital | digital | DS18B20 BREAKOUT | ✅ |
| sd card reader | sensor, digital | digital | adafruit' | ✅ |
| stepper driver | actuator, digital | digital | DRV8825 | ✅ |
| step drv expansion | actuator, digital | digital | A4988 Stable 42 | ✅ |
| addressable LED strip | actuator, digital | digital | WS2811 | ✅ |
| flow sensor | sensor | digital | digiten FL-608 | ✅ |
| infrared temperature | sensor | digital | MLX90614 | ❌ |
| ToF Laser Ranging | sensor | digital | VL53L0X | ❌ |
| ultrasonic distance | sensor | digital | HC-SR04 | ❌ |
| accelerometer | sensor | digital | MPU-6050 | ❌ |
| load cell module | sensor | digital | HX711 | ❌ |
In order to maintain focus on content about the lab itself, we won't dive into details about the circuits and learning modules in this repository. Details will be built into individual documented projects, each being open-source and having the same quality level of explanations, images, diagrams, and open documentation as presented here in the OpenLab Project.
The electronics projects & prototypes are built up from these main supplies, each with a category and a bin label. Let's start with the key points for the photos below.
- 🔋💡Learning Electronics: Today i’ve arranged the electronics of OpenLab for photographs to display the 9 most important bins. The components you see here are the range of parts you’ll handle if you spent 5 years continually trying out new electronics projects and retaining the most useful parts.
- 🎛️How is it organized? The bins each define a category where parts of one family reside, usually grouped by an action-based category. The MCU box is ready when you need to choose an MCU and begin a project. The Soldering box has spare supplies that populate the soldering bench. The sensors bin is where I reach to gather the right sensor module for a circuit.
- This grouping helps in 3 ways:
- ⏰ TIME SAVING when we take an action in the lab, it’s supported by just one box like “gather the dupont pins to build my cables” so we don’t need 6 drawers of parts for one action.
- 📋 INVENTORY or parts ordering: when we need to order a part, just one box can inform us if the inventory ran out, or if a related part will fulfill the need.
- 📦 OVERFLOW avoidance: this selection of parts categories contains 1000 little decisions that create space for inbound inventory without needing more bins. All these boxes have survived 3~8 years without a change of labels. We continually order more parts but we don’t outgrow the space because the category is defined by a limited set of needs. Only the sensors box ran out of space so far, and I’m proud of that!
- 📺What’s coming next? You can see based on these boxes the wider scope of OpenLab which I did not yet cover with videos. What will we learn on David’s youtube channel next year? What projects could I build with the knowledge in OpenLab? These components should tell the story of what is on the way. I’ve used almost every single component in past projects and I’ll gradually rebuild better and more refined versions that are template projects to be stored on OpenLab with documentation and BOM and everything. 5)🔌 What device should I choose? If you’re building electronics on your own, I encourage you to choose parts among these selections because most of them are highly popular, from strong suppliers, and central to engineering of multidisciplinary systems. Photos will be posted on openLab this week with HIGH RESOLUTION and you can read lots of the model numbers in the photos soon! 😉
The battery bin or battery category is a byproduct of projects including a lithium-ion battery. For a standard we focus on 18650 cells for their high performance and ubiquitous availability but some projects will occasionally include a foil-wrapped flat cell type of battery and then a connector becomes involved. Battery integration includes types of contacts for the terminals, sometimes a tray component that includes those terminals. For multi-cell projects, a PCB with battery management is required, and this bin also includes custom wraps and a couple of components relating to welding battery tabs. These thin nickel strips are included inside most OTS battery packs but we can also perform battery welding in the lab. This approach compared with soldering builds up less heat on the battery and preserves it from heat-related damage.
DIN rail is the most important circuit-supporting category of parts I wish to bring into more classrooms and younger audiences. By 2020, the parts are highly available and low cost, but they seem unfamiliar because they come from heavy industrial projects. The DIN rail components are the best method for terminating and routing cables that carry power, as opposed to signals. In SCUTTLE Robot's chassis as well as any project above 50 watts of power, you'll find us implementing DIN rail as the mechanical structure where modular terminals will be assembled. More discussion to be added over time (DM 2026).
Dupont style connectors, or dupont terminal housings, are the most popular type of removable cable ends for all DIY electronics projects. They are one of the simplest options, with low cost parts, modular cable setup, and just overall easy and cheap. For any project where you find signal wires with a different type of connector than this, it is for reasons like water resistance, shock and vibration, heat, or some other specialty condition where the use-case demands a particular strength in the connector design. But for generic functional cables, this is the one to use. Find here the various housings with one or two rows for terminals, and crimp-ready terminal parts for male or female. For male connections, always consider just using a plain 1-strand copper wire instead of the male. Most of the actions involving these cables are for the female wire end type. Males on the other hand, get soldered to the board so we stock male through-hole pins in the bin to outfit any board. These are the exact same components found in the Raspberry Pi or Arduino devices from the factory.
Microcontrollers (MCUs) for openLab actually refer to "microcontroller boards" or a whole printed circuit board populated with one microcontroller and all the minor circuity required to give a user access to the main i/o pins of the controller, resulting in a device that looks like an arduino or the popular "ESP" devices. These are produced in a wide range of generic brands but are highly reliable because the sophisticated components are manufactured by extremely high-tech chip fabricators and manufacturers. When a student talks about "using an arduino to control plant watering" the Arduino is just one leading brand who built these boards and formed a dedicated UI that helps a novice programmer connect this device to their PC, write simple scripts in c++ language, and reprogram the MCU to cycle through a sequence of functions. Among the most popular boards are the ones in the photograph. The boards include the simplest arduino, then ESP8266, a device with a WiFi transciever included, and ESP8266, a device with a bit more computing power and the same type of WiFi module. These devices are the starting point for a low-cost DIY circuit project, and they mostly come with male "header pins" which are just plain conductor pins exposed in a row. For programming, users usually use the Arduino IDE, find the free library that includes their board's functions, and compile a code inside this IDE to build a binary file that is then transmitted to the board. This transmission happens by USB cable so each of these MCU boards will include a USB port. The cost is so low now that we can build a device with these computing modules, plus buy the cables, and the sensors, and 3D print an enclosure for less than the cost of the engineering time to write the software. This brings us to an incredible new era, if we take advantage of it.
Pigtails – These are connectors that ship as one manufactured part containing the connector and the cable. They are not usually desired except for special cases involving waterproofing or a complex connector like the “airplane terminals” included below with metal housings. This bin is also a destination for recovered cable connectors from dismantled devices, to retain valuable cables instead of discarding them. For your own lab, I recommend setting up a pigtail box because it keeps your other sorted parts more orderly while these bulkier pieces don't take space. Sometimes this box captures an hour of technical effort from a past project, where valuable time went into soldering a neat cable but the device is no longer needed. You can recover that soldering time if your project recycling process can retain some assets like a well-made pigtail connector assembly.
This bin contains the most interesting range of components. Each sensor comes from a different field of engineering development but collectively they make up a complete pallete for a thermodynamics perspective. Measurement of energy is covered with a current meter. Heat is measured by thermistors and thermocouples. Humidity is measured with an extremely refined and low cost chip, along with barometric pressure and ambient temperature. As we move along from broader thermodynamic concepts to specific user-related measurements, we eventually find the same sensor system reused but calibrated in a specific system. For example, we measure light intensity with one device in this bin but another device is also measuring light intensity while enclosed in a translucent capsule. This device is called a “turbidity sensor” because it has the light measurement integrated in a form that sends water in between an emitter and receiver. So, ultimately we are just measuring a change in light intensity but the wonderful world of consumer goods produced a highly popular and low cost variety of light sensor that is precalibrated for that specific need.
One criteria for the sensor bin was to cover a full range of physical phenomena to be measured, and the other criteria is to outfit the lab with each device which is a global popular device. Encoders are somewhat specialized in terms of physics but are a standard need for automotive applications so these are found in many published arduino-style tutorials. With a handful of added devices from these tutorials, we get a wide scope of options for education and self-training in circuits altogether.
The sensors-2 bin was allocated after about 3 years of expanding the parts collection. The sensors were divided between two bins and the most favorable devices went into bin 1 while the older or less standard items went into bin 2. This bin features a GPS which is a popular sensing topic but more costly and complex than most sensors. The bin includes SD card-reading devices, which add a hard drive storage space to an MCU project but they have a tradeoff of effort and additional wiring to integrate. It also includes a strain-gauge amplifier unit and separately, a multi-strain gauge load cell device which computes load from the strain measurement on a pre-calibrated aluminum bar. This module still requires finishing steps in the calibration of the system to be performed by the user, and the integration requires a healthy knowledge on mechanics of materials. As a general guideline, if you are planning to use a given sensor from the bin number 2, know that it will take many more steps than the sensors from bin number 1. Those steps maybe finding a software library to fit the device specs, arranging mechanical sensors based on calculations, or in any case something that places it in a higher-effort tier. In my role as an advisor to students, I recommend they avoid the bin2 sensors in favor of bin1 if they are constrained to only 1 semester for a project. Also note: when a sensor requires extra effort as mentioned, it also has fewer online resources to perform a self-study. The integrations of others’ projects carry more variables so the repeatable steps for a first-timer is reduced. The best tutorial you find maybe in another language or written for a setup that’s only a partial match for yours.
Servos and their accessory devices include only a few device form factors because these devices fell into a standard throughout a few decades of popularity in remote-controlled cars and planes. Engineering companies like Futaba poured strong technology development into this field in such a way that compared with a bare DC motor, these servos contain at least tenfold total engineering technology. While a servo motor is broadly defined as a motor with a feedback control system, this particular bin includes just one type of servo motor and a few variations of that type. That is because the cost is far lower than designs residing at 2x larger or 2x higher power output. These are available sometimes below $10 each, including metal geartrain, an analog sensor system, and sets of “servo horns” which couple to the output shaft for various lever arms or linkages. These devices operate at 5v and with low current suitable for the ~24 gauge copper leads, and have various options like high-speed or high-torque. The engineering goes all the way to the failure modes, with the gear teeth on the servo horns having weaker plastic than the output gear, so the expendable portion is damaged in a crash condition while the main portion is safe.
Despite their origins in the hobby market where they are driven by dedicated single-purpose controllers, the servos respond to a standard pulse input with 50 hz and 20milisecond pulse width at 5 volts. This is easily achievable with the popular low-cost MCUs and a custom-written program because the MCU pins match in their sizing and the output pins can easily fine-tune around a 20 milisecond range. So, one could say this is the most sophisticated complete control system having a mechanical actuator under $20, or the most powerful torque-generating item that could be mated to a MCU board without supplemental power. For any larger actuation efforts, we move out of a small bin and into individual orders and selections of actuators.
See the soldering bin here. From the wide range of soldering materials I encountered in the Electronics program at texas A&M, I selected recurring supplies that are necessary year after year. I've omitted a whole category of parts relating to "surface mount components" for projects involving the placement and soldering of tiny surface-mount (SMD) chips onto electronics boards. My efforts are truncated at projects below the size of through-hole components because the scope of soldering expands vastly once you pass that threshold. That also expands the necessary expertise and engineering to decide on the fabrication methods and components. Sticking with items above 1.25mm in size, the collection of solder supplies remains very manageable and most are shown here. A number of supplies are kept directly at the soldering station and this is the bin I access to resupply or grab a special unit of a solder-related item. Please note we do not lose any functional project opportunities by avoiding SMD soldering. Instead, we can easily shop for turnkey boards that have been produced to operate each relevant device from a wifi chip to sensor units. All those boards exist on the market, often with extra features we can gain for no additional cost - actually a lower total cost than building our own boards with tiny components.
With a small stretch of the term actuators, I purposed a newer bin for small types of actuators that I'm calling "electrical actuators" and it's the category based on relays and similar. It also carries some audio amplifier boards, or any device that is not a sensor but becomes tied to the output of a microcontroller in a project. I've added large resistors here which one might consider actuators if it is used as a heater, like I've described in a video in 2026.05. Note that most of the actuators in OpenLab are larger items like motors, pumps, fans, LED lamps, which don't fit in these small divider bins and belong in a bigger storage space.
This bin began with the Schurter brand devices which are power input sockets for AC power on one side and spade-terminal connectors on the other side. They fit into the wall of an enclosure or in a panel for a device. After establishing some standards for the most relevant types, they were ordered in quantity and included here. This type of "connector" should exclude the small connections like Dupont that are setup for every MCU circuit, and only include the connectors that are major elements in a design.
The title of this bin should be "Terminals for 10 amps and greater" which tends to suit a different range of projects than the smaller terminal types in other bins. Anderson terminals include housings as well as crimped pieces, which have 3 sizes for gauges and have specs of 15, 30, 45A. Most of the common appliance terminals shown here (such as blue or pink spade terminals) are rated for 10A or less. This is a good practice, keeping the amperage below 10 amps for your designs because it makes it easy to choose a common terminal and to implement wire sizes that cooperate nicely with these. 18 Gauge is the standard wire gauge for SCUTTLE Robotics power items and 16 gauge is sometimes used in the Lab for our large battery-driven projects ie actuators tied into the 18v lithium power tool batteries.
A bin for current-carrying switches, ranging from micro limit switches to the large enclosed roller-lever switches. Sourced over seven-plus years, this simplified range of switch options was found to be sufficient for nearly all circuit needs. Momentary buttons are included, as well as AC and DC variations. Observe that this category excludes small signal-level switches such as tiny breadboard modules. These are power switches only.
