[HN Gopher] Electronic project kits: hands on with a vintage 160...
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Electronic project kits: hands on with a vintage 160-in-1 (2016)
Author : rwmj
Score : 40 points
Date : 2024-03-21 18:12 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| rwmj wrote:
| Also a link to the manual:
| http://www.zpag.net/Electroniques/Kit/160_manual.pdf
| Cheyana wrote:
| I had the Science Fair 150-in-1 kit. It really takes me back to
| my tinkering. I saw one some years ago on Ebay (among other
| childhood things) but I thought it's best left to memories.
| donglebix wrote:
| Wow what a flashback, I'm pretty sure my dad had this exact model
| in the 80s. I'm remembering most of the components in the
| picture, amazing. Thank you HN
| brudgers wrote:
| I have an unused breadboard. I bought a couple of Radio Shack
| Science Fair kits a few months ago.
|
| The scale and design of the Radio Shack kits has worked for me
| and I have actually tinkered after decades of being off put by
| breadboards.
|
| The Radio Shack kits are not professional tools which is a
| feature not a bug. If you have always wanted to play with
| electronics, it might be worth picking one up on eBay.
|
| Or not.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I had Philips ones when I 5-6 in the 70s. I ran downstairs even
| morning before school etc to build things. It was excellent. Now
| you can get everything for peanuts but those things were magical
| at the time.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Philips EE8 (or EE20)? I had it as well; spent countless hours
| having fun with various experiments. I recall years later
| finding its manual and converting the 1st stage of the radio
| receiver experiment to use a silicon transistor. Was mostly a
| trial and error process than proper design, but it worked quite
| well.
| proee wrote:
| I picked up a few of these as a kid at garage sales. Spent hours
| wiring up circuits that sometimes worked.
|
| These kits, plus the Radio Shack Forrest Mims books, will always
| have a special place in my heart.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I loved these things, major flashback. I was already on the path,
| but as a Computer Engineer to be, I gobbled this stuff up!
|
| But also, I confess: I don't feel like I really learned that much
| from it. I already had a rudimentary Ohms law & binary logic
| understandings in elementary school, and most of the projects
| either were obvious from that premise, or were way way above my
| head & quasi-magical. I loved these things, they were
| inspirational, but I struggle to recall learning much from them.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Yeah, I had one too, but similar feelings. Enjoyed it, but
| didn't learn much if anything. Had much more fun later bread-
| boarding digital circuits as part of comp-sci at uni. Building
| a traffic light (LED) sequence generator out of flip-flops
| built from NAND gates was basic but fun!
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| That was _exactly_ my experience as well. I 'm not really
| sure why that was, but I think that the breadboard scaled
| much farther and could be extended with more of them (mine
| were interlocking). I built some moderately complex circuits,
| but debugging them could be fairly tedious.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| The 65-in-1 kit was one of my treasured childhood experiences
| (circa 1974). I ended up with a degree in electrical engineering,
| though I was probably on that path anyway.
|
| The highlight was when I was futzing with a slow oscillator and
| accidentally discovered that using using the speaker transformer
| as a voltage step up I could get the inductive voltage spike when
| the relay switched to give a painful shock.
|
| I wrote down that wiring diagram so I wouldn't lose it. One of my
| brothers had built a 9V variable power supply in a high school
| shop class, so we made use of that to create a pain game: hold
| the two leads and turn up the 9V supply output until you gave up.
| Whoever got the voltage knob the highest won. Our arm muscles
| would be involuntarily twitching, like a TENS unit.
|
| The other game was one person would hide it in the house
| somewhere, say a closet, and the other person would use an AM
| radio to locate it, as the spike would release broadband RF
| energy which could be picked up by the radio. The closer one was
| the louder the clicking would come out of the speaker.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Oh, boy, I had that 65-in-1 set too. It was transformative and
| is why I'm a dev now, in an indirect way. That kit made me
| interested in electronics, which got me to take a digital
| electronics class, which is where I was exposed to programming.
| As a kid in a very poor family, I couldn't afford to buy parts,
| but I had access to a mainframe computer for free -- so I
| shifted my focus to programming.
|
| I still do hobbyist electronics to this day.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| I had one of these, not sure of the exact model. I built AM
| transmitters, radio receivers, break-the-light-beam alarms, all
| kinds of things. Magical things when I was a kid.
| Lariscus wrote:
| I looked up some science kits recently and was quite
| disappointed. Nobody produces anything close to the great kits I
| used to enjoy as teenager. I was especially fond of my chemistry
| set. The new versions all seem neutered in comparison. I guess
| science kits can't compete with all the distractions available to
| modern teenagers, and these kits were quite expensive making them
| probably a hard sell. Still, I wish someone would make these
| again.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Old style chemistry sets with actual glassware and actual
| chemicals seemed to die a painful death during the GWoT and
| meth lab panics of the early to mid 2000's.
|
| They were _fantastic_ fun too.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Yeah, this. I suspect I'll have to cobble something together
| myself for my kid. I have fond memories of making crystal
| gardens, distilling wood gas, bending glass tubes, making
| gunpowder, etc.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| I had one of these growing up, absolutely fantastic bit of kit
| for learning. Eventually ended up taking it apart for components,
| which in hindsight was a bloody stupid idea.
|
| Might find one on eBay...
| 01100011 wrote:
| I had one of these when I was around 6-8 years old. I did a few
| of the projects, but never spent much time with it until I
| realized I could hook up each part to an extension cord and when
| I plugged in the extension cord the part would explode.
|
| I spent a lot of time as a kid just making sparks. I loved taking
| batteries, wire, and a steel file and running the wire up and
| down the file while it sparked.
|
| Totally brainless, yet somehow I still managed to become a EE and
| an extra-class HAM.
| mysterydip wrote:
| I literally just found my 200-in-1 electronics kit instruction
| book in a storage bin today. Taught me a lot about electronics
| back in the day. Last thing I remember making on it was a crystal
| radio.
| StillBored wrote:
| I had one of the radioshack models in the 1980's as well. It was
| really helpful for learning basic circuits, but while it had a
| number of more advanced circuits, including three of four AM
| radio receivers, and a transmitter or two, I never really learned
| anything from those circuits despite reading the book a half
| dozen times. Looking at the 150 in one manual, the first
| transistor circuit is a basic small signal amplifier with the
| base connected to a coil. And now with a formal EE/CpE education,
| I can understand how/why it works and the biasing resistors, but
| I'm just as convinced that the book is largely useless except as
| a toy beyond the first dozen or two circuits because it doesn't
| do anything to explain the hows and whys of the circuits.
|
| The modern equivalent of course are Snap Circuits
| https://elenco.com/snapcircuits/ but having purchased one of the
| larger kits for my kids a couple years back I think they suffer
| from the same basic problem. Sure telling 10 year old me about
| BJT biasing might have been a bit much, but I really think it
| should have been included in some kind of side note even if it
| doesn't sink in the first time.
|
| PS: Actually thinking back on it, these spring board ones are
| probably better from the perspective that a blown component was
| easy to replace simply by pulling out the cardboard flipping it
| over and disconnecting the component from the springs underside.
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