The Crowfie makes it easy to test and develop your software code and electronics interfaces.

“Electronics is my bread and butter,” exclaims Thomas Lenihan, founder of Shiva’s Forge, and creator the Crowfie, one of the latest products seeking funding on Kickstarter.com.

Watch: Kickstarter of the Week: The Bread & Butter of Engineering

The Crowfie is a user interface panel between you and your microcontroller, electronics, robotics drive systems, and actuators. It integrates equally well between Arduino, Raspberry Pi, RC motors, as it does with automated assembly lines. 

“I’ve noticed the growing interest in robotics, electronics, and the maker movement; I’ve been paying attention to it and wanted to get involved with it more. So I decided to develop a project to help,” Lenihan explains.

Having worked professionally in many different industries over the years, including designing aircraft carrier control systems, flight testing helicopters, and big-jet flight simulators, Lenihan has an extensive background in engineering. For him, creating the Crowfie was just another day on the job, although he does admit to struggling a little. “The construction of the metal enclosure was my biggest challenge,” he says, but the rest was “a logical design developed from left to right.”

Lenihan also has experience designing and building specialized guitar power supplies for the professional guitar player. A guitar enthusiast himself, he knew that power supplies needed absolutely clean, dependable power, and applied this to the Crowfie. “I deliberately brought over much of the design aesthetic of guitar pedals and the music business to the general electronics arena,” Lenihan says.

With his experience in product development, Lenihan designed the panel to be as user friendly and easy to understand as possible. “I tried to create something that a user could look at and immediately make sense of,” says Lenihan. This thoughtful design can be seen in his inclusion of the flow lines that clearly show the user how the electricity is moving around inside the box. “You can concentrate on developing your project, instead of tracking down wiring mistakes.”

The Crowfie features completely isolated switches, lights, relays, and potentiometers to provide complete flexibility to design, test, and improve your project. The isolation allows users to insert these components into a system at any location, without grounding or shorting other components.

Additional features include:

• A large selection of input/output devices.
• 4 heavy-duty metal switches, for any number of uses.
• 4 red indicator lights for visual confirmation of circuit functionality.
• 2 electronic relays with 5 VDC and 12 VDC coils.
• 2 variable resistor potentiometers to provide a user-controlled voltage output.
• A 6″, 830 pin breadboard, with side power and ground bus.
• Various power options: 5 VDC @ 500 mA, 9 VDC @ 700 mA, 12 VDC @ 900 mA and 15 VDC @ 2000 mA.

The Crowfie is a true plug-and-play product. With no set up time, it comes with a wide assortment of 15 popular digital logic chips, including AND, NAND, OR, and buffers.

Lenihan has already contacted various contract manufacturers who are bidding for the Kickstarter funds for the first limited edition run.

“I am trying to help out a couple of different areas, the robotics movement, hobbyist electronics, and the maker movement in general; I have all three areas in mind,” Lenihan says. “We all have the ability to go out and create what we already have in our mind’s eye. If you think on a problem long enough, and experiment with enough solutions, eventually you will come up with something pretty amazing.”

To support Lenihan and the Crowfie, visit https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ratbot/shivas-forge-crowfie-turbocharges-your-robotics-pr?ref=category