AN-007 · Software · Finished
Started Jan 2024

Logic Labs: kits, a curriculum, a storefront, and a handoff

1.0Abstract

I started Logic Labs at my school in January 2024 to teach electronics from the transistor up. I designed the kits, wrote the curriculum, ran the workshops and built the React, Supabase and Stripe storefront. Over 60 students went through it, and in February 2026 I handed it to a student development team who still run it.

At a glance

Parameter	Value
Status	Finished. Handed off to a student team in Feb 2026; still running
When and where	Jan 2024 – Feb 2026, Dubai College
My part	Founder: designed the kits, wrote the curriculum, ran the workshops, built the storefront
Built with	Custom PCBs; React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Supabase (auth, Postgres, edge functions), Stripe Checkout, Nginx on an Oracle Cloud VM
Code	github.com/zhaojinchu/LogicLabsCommercePlatform
Students	60+, in the school curriculum, at zero profit
Kit	“Transistors to Logic Gates”: custom PCBs with swappable gate modules, probe points and power-safe headers
Curriculum	Transistor fundamentals → combinational logic → flip-flops → simple state machines

Zhaojin packing Logic Labs kits in the school makerspace: stacks of cardboard kit boxes on a workbench, a 3D printer and a component pegboard behind — A kit run being packed in the school makerspace.

Development History

Date	Milestone
Jan 2024	Founded. First kits and lesson plans; workshops for the first cohort.
2024	Pilot with the Head of Computer Science; curriculum aligned to the school’s outcomes; teacher onboarding workshops.
Nov 2024	Kits and lessons adopted into the school curriculum.
Aug – Oct 2025	Storefront built and deployed so students and schools could order kits.
Feb 2026	Handed off to a student development team. They still maintain and ship against it.

The idea

The school had a computer-science department and no hands-on electronics. Logic Labs started as a personal project, a kit that takes you from a single transistor to a working logic gate to a flip-flop, and grew into a program with a curriculum, instructor playbooks, an online companion, and a way to buy the kit.

The kit

Custom PCBs with swappable gate modules, probe points, and power-safe headers that survive a classroom. Component bins standardized around breadboard-friendly packages, so students could experiment without being overwhelmed. Lab cheat-sheets that teach the multimeter and the oscilloscope while students verify their own builds. The photo at the top of this page is a kit run being packed in the school makerspace.

The curriculum

Modular lessons progressing from transistor fundamentals to combinational logic, flip-flops, and simple state machines. Instructor playbooks with pacing guides, troubleshooting matrices, and assessment rubrics so the program slots into a school timetable. An online portal with animations, challenge problems, and quiz banks for self-paced work between lab sessions, with engagement tracked so exercises could be updated from data.

Logic Labs online course title page — The online companion: the course title page.

Logic Labs course layout — Course layout: each lab maps to one board module.

The storefront

A custom storefront so students and schools could order kits. React + Vite + TypeScript with Tailwind and shadcn/ui on the front; Supabase for auth (magic links or OAuth), Postgres, and three edge functions that do the real work:

create-payment validates the cart against the database with service-role privileges, creates a Stripe Checkout session, and returns the redirect URL;
stripe-webhook handles checkout.session.completed, verifies the Stripe signature, persists the order and line items, clears the cart, and stores the receipt URL;
retrieve-session returns the order summary after Stripe redirects the customer back.

The production build was served by Nginx on an Oracle Cloud VM, with secrets held in supabase secrets and a Supabase CLI deploy so environments stayed reproducible.

Logic Labs storefront home page — Storefront home page.

The handoff

In February 2026 I handed the codebase, the kit designs and the curriculum to a student development team at the school, which was the plan from the start. They still maintain and ship against it.

What broke

Stripe webhook signature verification fails with the synchronous verifier in the edge runtime; the repo uses constructEventAsync, and the README keeps the troubleshooting entry for it.
The storefront went live on a bare IP over HTTP, and the VM is now offline. The repository is the durable artifact.

What’s next

Not mine to decide any more.

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