[HN Gopher] Heathkit
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Heathkit
Author : hypertexthero
Score : 150 points
Date : 2023-05-01 12:31 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shop.heathkit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (shop.heathkit.com)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I built an FM tuner from a kit that I actually used for a long
| time. Looked kinda funky, though.
|
| They're the only reason I've ever heard of Benton Harbor, MI.
| crunkykd wrote:
| I remember getting a Lafayette 3-pickup electric guitar and
| building a Heathkit guitar amplifier. That thing had a dual-
| spring reverb too. I got a 4x12" speaker cabinet with Celstion
| speakers from the newspaper classifieds for $75. That thing was
| loud, and had a super high-frequency squeal when you turned it
| up. I think they just used a high-bandwidth amp design from their
| scopes rather than design a ground-up audio amp. But it taught me
| about oscillations, shocks from ungrounded chassis voltages, and
| electronics in general.
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20230501123146/https://shop.heath...
|
| https://archive.ph/68k0r
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| My father, a consummate scientist, geologist, and radio geek,
| hand-built our home component stereo system from Heathkits. That
| includes speakers, turntable, receiver/tuner and amplifier. He
| also ran speaker wires through the walls so that the impressively
| massive speakers could take their rightful place along the long
| wall of our living room. The stereo was installed in an ornate
| antique piece of wood furniture which we referred to as "The
| Commode" for reasons I can't fathom.
|
| EDIT: apparently, "commode" has been a word for normal furniture
| way longer than it was a euphemism for "toilet".
|
| It was a long, long time until I truly and deeply appreciated
| what a labor of love, and what a technical achievement that must
| have been for my father to build that. I never really liked the
| stereo because it seemed obsolete before its time and didn't
| sound all that good, but man, handbuilt. Hats off to you, papa.
| ambientenv wrote:
| Wonderful! Had similar experiences, too. My dad and I built the
| AR1500 receiver together on top of the ping pong table in the
| basement. My first "transistor radio" as a kid was also a
| Heathkit. I can recall test equipment like a VTVM and other
| stuff which we also built together. It was a great introduction
| to electronics and radio with lifelong benefits.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| My dad built a few Heathkit devices like signal generators,
| etc. for his home electronics repair sideline in the 1960's and
| 70's, and as I reached max capability at building plastic model
| kits he asked me to build a Heathkit oscilloscope. It was a
| whole new universe, but the satisfaction was indescribable. He
| was a wizard, and I did my best. Between Heathkit, Radio Shack,
| military surplus, and later Fry's in San Jose, I was in tech
| doodad heaven.
| angst_ridden wrote:
| In the early 80s, my dad bought a Heathkit oscilloscope, and
| we assembled it together.
|
| My father's in his 90s now, and I think he still uses that
| scope!
| markbnj wrote:
| Came here to say this. My Dad also built our stereo, as well as
| our first color television, from Heathkit kits. He built some
| other stuff too... an aircraft radio receiver I think. He was a
| mechanical engineer (now retired). I remember hanging out in
| his workshop as he pieced the projects together. It was my
| first exposure to real electronics and componentry.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Did that TV have an ultrasonic remote? Cause our heathkit TV
| did...
| dole wrote:
| My dad built our color console TV from Heathkit and we had
| at least one of those remotes. Besides volume and channel
| rocker buttons, it also had them for the tint and contrast
| too (?) and that was about it, IIRC.
| memcg wrote:
| I built an IM-2215 digital multimeter around 1981 and still use
| it. Also have a bunch of other Heathkit test equipment packed
| away somewhere.
| Wistar wrote:
| My older brother--perhaps 16 or 17 years old at the time--spent
| several summer weeks building a Heathkit guitar amplifier. I
| think he still has it.
| jpmattia wrote:
| So glad to see the return of these guys. Growing up in the 70s,
| they were one of the few portals to the universe of electrical
| engineering.
| squarefoot wrote:
| I hope to be wrong; as an European I know Heathkit only from what
| was published back in the day on Electronics magazines, the
| occasional kit that arrived here and the archive of old projects
| of that era still available online [0,1], however this appears to
| me as a completely different business with mostly overpriced
| products; as for now all I see is the name.
|
| [0] https://www.vintage-radio.info/heathkit
|
| [1] https://archive.org/search?query=Heathkit
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| My first program was for a Heathkit programmable calculator that
| I got (and put together) in the mid-1970s.
| wduquette wrote:
| In the mid-70's my dad built a Heathkit-branded DEC PDP-11, with
| a dumb terminal and a paper tape reader/punch for I/O. Later he
| got dual 8" floppy drive, and upgraded the memory from 16K to 28K
| (the maximum!). I learned to program BASIC and Pascal on that
| machine (with a few nods at Assembler and FORTRAN 4), and never
| looked back. Still programming today.
| MrFoof wrote:
| Our family TV growing up was a Heathkit. Somewhere in the 20-25"
| range, with a (wired) remote control. My father built his way up
| to it.
|
| They kept it around for over 25 years. The reality is if anything
| went wrong with it, my father still had the instructions and
| could just refer to it to ultimately perform a repair.
| rwl4 wrote:
| They seem to be down. In the meantime:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230501123146/https://shop.heat...
|
| As a kid, I remember seeing their Hero 2000 on Mr Wizard. It
| ignited my imagination and I ordered a catalog. Then I saw the
| price. I went on to get a number of other robots, mostly from
| Tomy, but they paled in comparison to Hero 2000. When I got a
| little older, I even started reading about neural networks. Shame
| I never went further with that!
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I put a few pics and videos of my dad's old Hero Jr. up. I
| barely remember him piecing it together as one of my earliest
| memories. Still works fine. Had a little Y2K glitch but was no
| problem. Just thinks it's 1923 now.
|
| https://partofthething.com/thoughts/the-hero-jr-personal-rob...
|
| A guy keeps contacting me to try to sell his if you want one.
| quercusa wrote:
| The sonar sensor looks like the one from the Polaroid SX-70,
| another wonder of that age.
| rwl4 wrote:
| Thanks for the offer. TBH, now that I'm older, I have come to
| realize that some super neat-o things don't really fit into
| my life and would be sadly neglected. I've contemplated
| creating a display case in my office of all the gadgets I've
| bought over the years that are in pristine condition.
| euroderf wrote:
| I was told that the first versions of Hero had grippers that
| could crush a pencil. (Or a finger.) And that they soon pushed
| out a "fix" that force-limited the grippers.
| varjag wrote:
| As a kid in then-USSR I've seen Heathkit Hero in a translated
| book on robotics. It felt like a piece of tech from Alpha
| Centauri.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Ah, I too had to settle for Tomy after drooling over the Hero
| range as a child.
| ncr100 wrote:
| (humor?) Server is in an unheathy state
| gregoriol wrote:
| First, Cloudflare verification Then, Internal Server Error
|
| Love it!
| bigattichouse wrote:
| Hackernews hug of death.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| I still use my Heathkit power supply that I built in the 90's. I
| should give my dad a call and thank him for buying it for me.
| Between that and the TI 99/4A, it led me to my career in software
| development.
| W-Stool wrote:
| Before there were personal computers if you were a geek you
| likely studied to get a ham radio license and built Heathkit
| amateur radios. This was me in the early 70s as a kid and it
| really helped propel me into a IT career later on when the
| technology became affordable/available. Heathkit was really
| something back in the day!
| ghaff wrote:
| Heathkit was of an era when you could still reasonably build
| non-toy electronics projects from components without
| unreasonably expensive test equipment and other tools. It
| arguably wasn't until Raspberry Pi and Arduinos that we got
| back to that, albeit at a different level of abstraction.
| alden5 wrote:
| I'd say between that healthkit and arduino's it was snap-
| circuits which allowed kids like me to get into electronics,
| the manual was detailed and looking back it's fairly
| technical although it unfortunately it always assumed you
| knew what they meant, the manual would tell you to never
| short circuit the battery but 7-y/old me was so confused as
| to why you shouldn't because it never got into things like
| electron flow.
| ghaff wrote:
| Way back when I remember having having this kit which
| consisted of magnetic blocks that were variously switches,
| diodes, buzzers, etc. that you could snap together to build
| various types of circuits.
|
| At one point I had something else that was closer to a
| breadboard (though it wasn't) but as I vaguely recall it
| had a lot more options but it was hard to actually build a
| working circuit.
|
| I did briefly get into Heathkit after I graduated school at
| one point and built a power supply that I still use
| sometimes but it was pretty much the end of the Heathkit
| era at that point.
| noefingway wrote:
| In the early to mid-60s I built a shortwave radio and a digital
| clock. Unfortunately neither survived. I still think about that
| clock sitting by my bed, glowing reddish orange. Sigh....
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Back in the 1950s and '60s my dad built a few EICO kit devices.
| They were another supplier of build-it-yourself electronic
| testing equipment to go along with Heathkit:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eico
|
| There was a lot of military surplus gear back then too for
| DIYers.
| rmason wrote:
| My entire ham radio station was built from Heathkits in the
| sixties. I still have the transceiver and linear amplifier in
| storage. Been meaning to replace all the capacitors and fire it
| back up. It would be like restoring a car I drove in my teen age
| years, reminding me of many good times.
|
| Got on their mailing list when they attempted a comeback but
| haven't heard a thing from them in years.
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| When I was a kid in, I think it was 1959, my Dad bought me a
| Heathkit short wave radio. I did much of the soldering myself,
| with my Dad supervising. The radio worked and for years
| afterwards, I listened to long wavelength broadcasts from around
| the world. I had an antenna in our yard that was 30 feet off the
| ground, and we lived on a hill. I was amazed at what I could
| receive.
| euroderf wrote:
| dunno how Velleman kits might stack up in terms of educational
| value.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I built several Heathkids, including an H11 (PDP-11 computer)
| with all the accessories.
|
| They were all a wonderful experience. The kits were excellent.
| p1mrx wrote:
| https://shop.heathkit.com/shop/product/most-reliable-clocktm...
|
| > So the time stays accurate and the alarm stays active with no
| line power--for weeks.
|
| > Batteries: 6 AA cells required (not included).
|
| Seems strange to brag about 6 AA batteries keeping time for a few
| weeks, when there are watches that run for 10 years on a coin
| cell. Maybe the batteries actually power the LEDs?
| drones wrote:
| Wow! I'm 21 now but I wish I had known about this when I was
| younger and getting into programming, I would have been all over
| this. I sometimes get a little jealous of the old timers - I
| think being able to grow up with the evolution of computers and
| learn as they become more complex is a really wonderful thing.
|
| Had a look around and I'm interested in buying this
| microcontroller kit, has anyone tried this before? What did you
| think?:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20221203215708/https://shop.heat...
|
| I took a Nand2Tetris course at my Uni and really enjoyed it, but
| was disappointed when there was no practical element for
| physically building any of the circuits. Hoping this can scratch
| my itch.
| koromak wrote:
| Ben Eater might be up your ally. Just finished his 8-bit CPU
| build, boy it was an experience.
|
| https://eater.net/8bit/
| mdswanson wrote:
| This is the way.
| stevekemp wrote:
| Take a look at https://www.tindie.com/ there are many single-
| board Z80/6502 computers that you can assemble for sale.
|
| You could start smaller with other simple devices, but there
| are lot of options if you click around.
| bluescrn wrote:
| These days, the possibilities for hobbyist electronics are
| endless.
|
| You can still use breadboards and discrete components to
| experiment with the basics, but now you've got the world of
| microcontrollers and FPGAs to explore, you can use open-source
| tools to design custom PCBs and have them manufactured
| inexpensively, you can 3D print housings or mechanical parts
| for your projects, you can build inexpensive IOT devices with
| ESP8266 modules, you can do things with robotics and drones
| that we could hardly imagine in the 80s, and it's all more
| affordable then ever (although stock shortages of certain items
| may still be a problem...)
| thinkmassive wrote:
| Retrocomputing continues to increase in popularity. In addition
| to the Heatkit, you might be interested in kits from RC2014,
| SmartyKit, Ben Eater, Foenix C256, etc. There's many more that
| are based around an RPi or microcontroller if you're less
| concerned about authenticity.
| privong wrote:
| > I'm 21 now but I wish I had known about this when I was
| younger and getting into programming, I would have been all
| over this.
|
| Unfortunately Heathkit didn't really make kits from 1992 until
| recently (I think the past year or two, though the Wikipedia
| article[0] is vague on when it resumed), aside from a brief,
| failed attempt in 2012.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Growing up as a (young? future? wannabe?) engineer kid in the
| 90s, I immediately knew who the powerful old engineering wizards
| were upon walking into their house, because of the 'Heathkit'
| logos on inconspicuous devices. On more than one occasion, I
| would end up at a house party of people I didn't know, and then
| start hunting for whomever made those Heathkits, because I knew
| they would be an amazing person to meet, that could teach me
| something.
| [deleted]
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| I bought a morse code keyer from Heathkit when I was a kid. It
| was the only thing I could afford at the time but I spent many
| hours reading their catalog and lusting over their ham radio
| kits.
| Starwatcher2001 wrote:
| One of my first "serious" electronic builds in the 1970s was a
| variable, current limiting PSU from Heathkit. (Advertised in
| Practical Electronics). Used that together with a breadboard kit
| to launch a life long interest in electronics. Still have the PSU
| in the loft and a handful of old circuits lovingly converted to
| Veroboard, or homemake PCBs made from copper-clad board etched
| with ferric chloride (until my mum got the vapours about me
| "messing around with chemicals" and stopped that route).
| johnnyballgame wrote:
| I remember my dad building the depth-finder/fish-finder. We
| always had it in the boat with us. Who knows if it ever really
| helped us find fish, but we sure had fun with it.
|
| Side note - I really miss that you can barely buy RC car "kits"
| anymore. Everything now comes RTR (ready-to-run). And that takes
| most of the fun out of it, for me at least.
| Arcanum-XIII wrote:
| Beside traxxas, nearly all manufacturer propose kit, especially
| for high end rc car :)
|
| For plane and quadcopter it's way harder though :\ submarines
| is still a more open field though ! Then there's the hydraulics
| model. None are in kit, which saddens me a lot. Maybe too
| dangerous for common folk (like building a tube amp)
| robomartin wrote:
| I still have a pair of robot arms form the Hero 2000 robot. Nice
| and robust. Not too fast, yet it wouldn't be too hard to update
| them to use DC brushless motors, etc.
|
| http://www.theoldrobots.com/hero2k.html
| hypertexthero wrote:
| Steve Jobs in Make Something Wonderful:
|
| > I got to know this man, whose name was Larry Lang, and he
| taught me a lot of electronics. He was great. He used to build
| Heathkits. Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these
| products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more
| money for them than if you just went and bought the finished
| product, if it was available. These Heathkits would come with
| these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together, and
| all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded.
| You'd actually build this thing yourself.
|
| > I would say that gave one several things. It gave one an
| understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it
| worked, because it would include a theory of operation. But maybe
| even more importantly, it gave one the sense that one could build
| the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These
| things were not mysteries anymore. I mean, you looked at a
| television set, and you would think, "I haven't built one of
| those--but I could. There's one of those in the Heathkit catalog,
| and I've built two other Heathkits, so I could build a television
| set." Things became much more clear that they were the results of
| human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in
| one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors.
| It gave a tremendous degree of self-confidence that, through
| exploration and learning, one could understand seemingly very
| complex things in one's environment. My childhood was very
| fortunate in that way.
|
| -- https://stevejobsarchive.com/book
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| "Also, I'm going to do everything I can to stop you from
| 'making something wonderful' with my own company's products. It
| was irresponsible for Heathkit to put high-voltage electronic
| equipment into the hands of the common folk. Someone could get
| shocked, or burn themselves with a soldering iron. And those
| Heathkit people didn't even bother to invent proprietary
| screws, so any kid with a quarter-inch nutdriver could take the
| cover off and get a face full of X-rays. No, not for us."
| smoldesu wrote:
| Be careful what you wish for, Apple Corporate might make a
| "Tinkering Program" where they ship you a flight case full of
| $40,000 worth of oscilloscopes and GPIO for a weekend so you
| may implement your idea. Only if you're okay paying 30%
| royalties on your invention of course, where would you be
| without their generous help after all?
| fanatic2pope wrote:
| It is really interesting to think about what the version of
| Jobs who talked so reverently about those kits would have
| thought if he were shown the Apple "what is a computer" ad
| from a few years ago.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Jobs was certainly an inspirational entrepreneur and CEO
| but he always talked out of both sides of his mouth. He'd
| mug for the cameras and say all of that lofty stuff about
| creativity, bicycles for the mind, etc., and then go back
| to the office for a knock-down, drag-out fight with Woz
| about whether the Apple ][ should come with expansion slots
| or a padlock.
|
| In business terms, Heathkit isn't something that he would
| have respected as anything but an unscalable niche hobby.
| Sucks that he would've been right about that.
| dalke wrote:
| > It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished
| product and how it worked, because it would include a theory of
| operation.
|
| My Dad would get Heathkit and I would build them. I even built
| 3 H-151 (IBM compatible) computers. My soldering skills were
| pretty good. But I didn't understand how they worked - I just
| followed the instructions.
|
| When I was a kid, around 5 years old, back in 1976, we got our
| first home game console. It was a Heathkit Pong clone, with
| variants for a couple related games, including duck hunt.
|
| A few years back I read https://pong-story.com/heathkit.htm
| which told me that my Dad must have had a Heathkit TV back
| then:
|
| > First, it requires a Heathkit TV set to operate because of
| its composite output. Back in 1976, only monitors and hi-tech
| equipment had a composite input. To use this system, the user
| had to open his TV set in order to connect a few wires to its
| electronic circuits. This is the case with the Heathkit TV
| sets: the user manual explains how to connect the system to
| several TV sets released by Heathkit. The system has another
| interesting feature: the sound does not come from the system
| itself like most of the other PONG consoles, but comes from the
| TV set
| cf100clunk wrote:
| > I didn't understand how they worked - I just followed the
| instructions
|
| Indeed, Heath's instructions took a paint-by-numbers approach
| that did not offer analysis or explanation, so I have to
| disagree with hypertexthero that more than very basic theory
| was communicated. As for circuitry explanation, I found out
| the hard way on one occasion that I hadn't soldered a
| transistor properly, but there were no instructions on how to
| test for such a problem within the same "anyone can do this
| on a kitchen table" kit, so I mailed the board to Heath and
| they sent it back in working order for a small fee and
| postage. It is nevertheless a fond memory.
| wrs wrote:
| It's been a looong time since I made a Heathkit (I think
| the last one was an oscilloscope in the 80s) but I do
| remember a theory of operation section in the manual,
| separate from the very clear assembly instructions. It's
| true of the ones I randomly checked in the archive [0].
| That said, the mail-in repair service for when things go
| sideways was a fantastic feature that not many kit
| companies had/have.
|
| [0] https://www.vintage-radio.info/heathkit
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(page generated 2023-05-01 23:01 UTC)