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500-in-1 Electronics Kits?
Oneamp asks: "I'm interested in a '500-in-one' type electronics kit. Amazon lists a few, but I've seen some user reviews that maybe they are not all they're cracked up to be. Most of the complaints seem to be of the 'Manual sucks' variety. Nevertheless, I'm sold on the idea. Can any of you, who have had actual experience with any of these kits, recommend a good one?"
If its 500 in 1 that manual would have to be huse to, um, not suck. # 152 [page] starter course manual! # 78 page advanced course manual! # 140 page programming course manual! ------------ 370 / 500 = .74 pages per project.
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Surely the manual won't explain the electronics behind it... but if you want to have fun building stuff, then go ahead a try it.
;)
I had a few of these as a kid, and they were almost certainly not disappointing... It makes me want to buy one right now!
Ditto
I've seen some user reviews that maybe they are not all they're cracked up to be. Most of the complaints seem to be of the 'Manual sucks' variety.
That's not a very nice thing to say about Manuel. You know, he's trying the best he can.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I'm still building the DIY Home CPU Kit, and I will tell you that the gates are a #*@% to install.
To be honest, I think your best bet is to get the kit and the "manual" separately.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to tutor an absolutely prodigal young kid, who happened to be 'into' electricity that season. I couldn't find any electricial kits that seemed up to snuff in both the hardware and manuals departments, so instead I ended up taking one of the bigger Radioshack kits, and then using some of the Forrest M. Mims III books as project guides. Why they don't have that guy do the manuals for the kits I have no idea, because he's really quite good.
For the few projects we wanted to do where the board didn't have the right parts, I just hacked them on, either in place of parts that I thought were trivial (resistors, etc.), or just by drilling a new hole in the board surface and adding it in.
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I remember playing with these in the early 80s. I think I had a 150 in one, and then they came out with the 160 and 500, but it has been so long I don't remember for sure. There were no ICs, just bunches of resistors, capacitors, etc., all with wire jumpers that were held in place by springs. Seems like there were all kinds of circuits you could build, from water and light sensors, to a radio.
I don't know if they are "worth it" as far as parts are concerned, but if a kid is wanting to play with and learn about basic electricity and electronics, it can be a good toy. In my case, my father worked on electronics and I grew up calculating resistor values by color and reading schematics.
Kits like these might be a good way to gauge the interest of a young person in electronics. If they really enjoy the kit, then it's probably going to be worthwhile to invest in more serious projects, books, and so on.
It used to be you could buy all kinds of chips and components from radio shack to build your own stuff. Over time a lot of those have fallen by the wayside. It's still possible to get some of them, but not like it used to be. Instead, I find Fry's Electronics to have all kinds of kits and things to build, like Radio Shack used it.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Was around 7. It was no fun compared to my mother's uncle or my older brother "sets". There are lots of things you can do with just wire, battery, old can and some nails. "Grow" salt crystal and build a radio (AM). Telegraph key and receiver. Motor.
True come are not electronic but the basics are there. There are big and easy to debug. Then get to into a TTL or Analog IC Manual. You can build from parts timers, radios, computers (from ALU and gates)
After all that start into computers like Z80 or V30. Look at embedded controlers.
After all all of this is just build blocks like legos!
Why not go for a slightly higher end FPGA board.. Altera do some great development kits: http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/kit-dev_pla tforms.jsp and you can then get some bread board and drive anything you want though various I/O ports on the boards.
Weird this question should come up. I'm just sort of starting to learn about how electronics work, and picked up this thing at Fry's for $12.99. It's for kids, and I'm in my 30s. But what the hell.
It comes with a 76 page illustrated book that takes you through building circuits of greater and greater complexity. I'm only up to page 22 or so (capacitors). The illustrated book is fairly clear, uses a water/pipe analogy to explain what's happening..
This, along with this free book, has provided hours of fun and an interesting intro to how these electric devices we see all the time actually work...
I haven't used a 500-in-1 kit yet, but considering how cheap this was, I feel like I've already gotten my moneys worth in watching a capacitor charge at different rates depending on the resistance I throw in front/behind it.
I know, I know. I'm easily entertained. Can't wait to make the transistor radio. That'll be cool. I mean, when it's done... I'll know how a radio works!
For anyone who's ever been interested in electronic machines and how they operate, I highly recommend the book ("Lessons In Electronic Circuits"), which is easy to read, and getting one of these little kits. Good times.
I guess nowadays you are supposed to do everything with ICs. When I was a kid the kit I had had a couple of basic ICs (NAND and NOR gates IIRC) and it came with about a hundred other discrete parts, resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors and LEDs to speakers, meters, and photocells. These kits look like they have a handful of ICs and almost nothing else. The LCD is a nice touch though, a lot better than the 8 segment LED I had.
One thing I remember is that, when you're 8, an IC might as well be a device of magic. The discrete components are a little easier to understand. Change a capacitor or a resistor and the pitch of the sound or the reading on the meter changes. Change a connection on the IC and everything just stops working or does something baffling. If you just want to build the circuits without understanding what they do then the ICs can do more but you won't learn anything.
If you want to learn about ICs that is great too but you can do that better with a breadboard, and when you're 12-14 and better able to understand them.
If found this to be really good explaining what it does and, in the end of the article, one example of how it does it.
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Just bought mine.
:)
I've been an amateur radio operator for 13 years now, so if the manual atleast has a circuit diagram, I think I can figure it out. Probably even come up with a few things not in the manual. I recommend looking into the Knight Electronics mini-lab as well.
I know Ramsey has a lot of experience in the DIY kit business. I would have more of their products, but I deliberately prevent myself (aside from this purchase) from spending money on their kits because there would be "one more thing" until I was completely broke.
The best combination is a kit + a good electronics book (get Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill and tell your kid to skip the math he doesn't understand). I remember being very disappointed with my electronics kit when I was a kid as it did not explain how the circuits worked and how to design your own.
You could do it the proper way, buy yourself a DC power supply, a whole bunch of breadboards, and a bunch of basic components.
You'll spend not much more money but you'll have the makings of a pro lab-bench.
I started with electronics in that way (at age 11), in the days when we'd only just started to leave the radio lamp era behind (yeah, I'm /that/ old but I refuse to grow up :-)
:-), but the real education took place when I started talking to the guy who ran the nearest electronics shop and who was kind enough to make time to explain the basics to a curious 11 year old (who cycled an hour to get to his shop :-). Learning about resistors, capacitors and how thy behave under AC and DC conditions, how a transistor works and things like NAND gates - all that is interesting but not always captured in kit manuals.
The manuals tend to tell you how to put things together and how to move from the schematics to the physical side of things, but few of them even have the most basic theory in.
Putting designs together is good to start with, and changing components to see what happens is also educational (as long as you stay with low voltage battery power or you get other effects of a more permanent nature
Conclusion: the kits are good because they give you the tools, but don't expect the insight to come from there - either local help or other beginners books may be better. Maybe How It Works on the Net may help, and I think there was a program called Crocodile Clips which did a similar thing on a virtual, on-screen board. No idea if it's still around.
Good luck, it's an interesting hobby.
Insert
The amazon one isn't too bad. The one I used as a kid thousands of years ago had wires you stuck into little springs. This one has a real breadboard area, an LCD and look at that nifty little keyboard! :)
Actually, I could use one of these things at work when I need a quick and dirty test fixture to provide some simple control signals. Cheaper than having our assembly area cobble something together.
They ought to make one with a small FPGA on it. And an Ethernet to serial port bridge to explore networking.
Even the description is hard to understand:
Item Weight: 1300 hundredths-pounds
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Anyway, I had one of those old stick-wire-in-spring kits back in the day, and it claimed a whopping 50 projects, ranging from basic instruction on concepts like resistance on up to basic crystal and transistor radio. A bit basic in terms of theory, but frighteningly close in scope to the hands-on experience I got while earning my degree in EE years later.
If you're a bit more hardcore, you can probably do better with some modular breadboard (you can buy build-it-yourself kits that include complete instructions for the power supply), a good electronics textbook, a multimeter, and a local electronics hobby shop. Avoid Radio Shack like the plague, and ask the EE department at your local university if they have any recommendations for where to buy discrete parts.
When I was younger I had this 200-in-1 kit which I am amazed to see is still being made! The manual for this one was good, at least in the edition I had. It included circuit diagrams for everything along with some explanation. Early circuits included wiring instructions - later on, you were supposed to figure those out from the circuit diagram. The projects start simple: by the end, you're using almost all the components on the board.
I see that the same company makes a 500-in-1 kit. Assuming this is of the same quality, it would be worth considering.
The problem with the 200-in-1 kit is probably common to all such kits. The transistors, ICs and LEDs are real - they are easy to damage by incorrect connection. You can replace the transistors with a bit of effort, but some components are soldered directly to a board. It's a real pain if you damage anything. I also don't like the use of batteries as a power source. I suppose that's a safety thing, but I'd prefer a good quality low-voltage PSU with an electronic fuse.
I think the next step after a kit like this is making your own circuits from 74-series logic ICs, which provide basic logic functions and some more complex devices like flip-flops, registers and counters. You can make all sorts of fun stuff with this, and you really only need a data book that covers the 74 series, a breadboard and a 5 volt PSU. This is great fun. Especially when you add a microcontroller!
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Radio shack use to have lots of them, also isn't there a store called Brainy Kids or something like that they would probably have a wide range of them.
www.arduino.cc
... etc. Its heart is an Atmel chip which is roughly similar to a PIC. Once it is programmed it can operate without being connected to the computer. In fact, you don't even need the board. You can develop using the board and then incorporate the chip in a standalone project. The online tutorials are excellent. In particular, there is a whole set of tutorials on learning electronics. The other thing that excites me is that there are hooks to a large variety of multimedia and web enabled programs. You can thus control your project from anywhere in the world.
The arduino is designed to be a multimedia interface. It connects your computer to sensors, switches, controllers
Having said the above, I have an old Radio Shack Science Fair kit. If you want to develop a project that uses simple electronics, it is excellent. Maybe the best thing is that everything is in the same place. You don't have to scrounge around to find things. You can use the projects in the manual to kludge together a simple system. Once everything is working you can design and build a pcb with confidence that it will work.
An op-amp is basically two transistors with the emitters joined together and connected to ground through a large resistance (ideally, a constant-current sink; but bear with me for now). The collectors are connected to supply via load resistors, and one of them is labelled as the output. (The other collector can be used as an inverted output, for connection of another stage to give more gain.) The two bases, with series resistors, are the inputs; the non-inverting input is the base of the transistor not serving the output.
When a voltage is presented at the inverting input, a current flows into it; the transistor on that side tries to let a larger current through its collector (and thus its emitter). The voltage at its emitter -- the output -- goes down. When a voltage is presented at the non-inverting input, a current flows into the base of the transistor on that side and it tries to let a larger current through. But the shared emitter resistor means that the other transistor can't let so much current through anymore, so the voltage at its collector goes up.
The reason for using a constant-current sink in the emitter path is that the changing collector-emitter resistances of the transistors can be significant, making the transfer function horribly non-linear unless the device is only working over a very narrow voltage range (much less than the supply voltage). This was never a problem with valves, when the circuit was called a "long-tailed pair" in reference to the large resistance between the two common cathodes and ground. Fortunately, constant-current sources and sinks are not hard to build using transistors, as long as you can find a pair which have similar electrical properties (obviously) and are in good thermal contact (so temperature variations affect both equally). Such conditions are easily met in an IC.
is that most of these kits are like low end chemistry sets: toys designed to appeal to parents. My wife bought one of those for my daughter; I went through the manual, and you couldn't do any of the interesting experiments with the basic kit. Instead it had you doing things like mixing sugar and iron filings, then separating the mixture with a magnet. I get the point, but it's hardly going to ignite a lifelong pssion for chemistry.
A good educational kit should allow you to interesting things at every level, your increasing skills opening up new possibilities.
I'd probably steer clear of toys. I'd look for something designed as a trainer for adults. The kind of kid who is going to do anything with the kit fits the adult profile better.
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I'm a professional electronic engineer. I have recently been wondering about what would be the best sort of thing to buy for the kids in my life (i.e. my nephew) and I'm convinced that the best thing to do is to buy a breadboard and components separately. There is lots of this sort of stuff available on Ebay. Then you can go in whatever direction you fancy: analogue electronics (op-amps, and fun things like the AD633 analogue multiplier), audio, video effects, microcontrollers, discrete digital logic, etc. Also consider getting an FPGA board like the $99 one from Digilent with a VGA video output. There is so much more flexibility when you can just order a few more components each month to build on what you already have.
The real challenge is finding a good book. I'm afraid I don't have any suggestions.
My brother got one of these 150-in-one electronics kit when I was a kid (mid 80s).
It came with a thick book that had a one-page writeup of each circuit. I studied each one until I started to catch on. Then I went to the public library and read their (abysmal) selection of electronics books.
Now I have my MSEE and I can still remember some of the experiments. The perplexing explanations I now realize were wrong. The Internet has made getting answers and datasheets to almost anything possible.
To someone starting now, I would suggest an alternative. Get one of those white plug-in breadboards and a selection of discrete components. A place like Electronix Express sells this stuff and caters to the educational crowd. Get a multimeter too. Then get books. For general electronics, buy the Art of Electronics. For a gentler introduction, borrow "There are No Electrons" from the library. To stay interested, get a practical book in an area you are interested in, such as the ARRL handbook if you like radio, or a robotics book if that's what you like. Examine those circuits until you understand them. And find an Internet forum to ask questions about what you're learning. sci.electronics groups are good. I've found the PIClist to have excellent off-topic discussions about general electronics questions. It's pretty good for PIC microcontrollers as well.
Dick Smith Electronics sells a few of these. You can find the 300-in-1 kit by visiting the main page and searching for "K0030" (for some reason they prevent deep-linking). I played with a few of these things back in the day and I remember them being pretty fun. However, these days I'd probably recommend Lego Mindstorms instead. With the kit, you're pretty much stuck with the 300 (or whatever) things it can make. With Mindstorms there's a huge fan base with new things being created and details published all the time.
Get this one: http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?produc tId=2102913
It has a VERY good "manual". Actually, there are two - one focused on digital, one on analog. This is the kit that started me on a long journey from "I don't know what a resistor is" to taking graduate classes in electrical engineering.
You will also want to get Horowitz and Hill's "The Art of Electronics". If you have any interest at all in learning about circuits, you'll want that book.
It's been years, so I doubt if the specific ones I have would still be on the market. I have a small one (a ten-in-one I think) that I got when I was in about third grade, and a somewhat larger one that I got when I was in about sixth or seventh grade I think. I haven't played with them in a good while either, but I'll tell you want I remember, in general: they're a lot of fun.
You do have to be diligent to go ahead and do all the projects in the book, even if some of them don't sound exciting and interesting. The reason is because each one is included for a reason, to demonstrate some principle. They start with simple concepts and work up, so if you skip, you'll miss and potentially not understand stuff. (I assume some kits have more built-in redundancy in this regard than others, though, and maybe with the larger kits you can afford to skip more than would have been the case with my relatively small kits.)
On the other hand, once you've built the stuff in the book, you can improvise a bit. I was able on a couple of occasions to combine two different projects from mine and make something the book didn't really tell you how to make as such, though I no longer remember all of the details. (This was in about 1989, so as you can imagine I may have forgotten some of the finer points ad interim.) It does stick in my head that the kit didn't have a microphone as such but the earphone could be used as an input, and the piezo buzzer as an output (albeit, not a very high-quality one). One supposes if I'd had several of each component, rather than one each of most of them, I'd have been able to do more advanced things like telephone-like two-way communication systems.
One of these kits may not fulfill all your dreams of being an electrical engineer, but IMO it *is* well worth having. Recommended. Get one.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
An op-amp is basically two transistors with the emitters joined together and connected to ground through a large resistance (ideally, a constant-current sink; but bear with me for now). The collectors are connected to supply via load resistors, and one of them is labeled as the output.......
8-|
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As an EE who started off with one of those 50-in-one kits when I was 8, I have a few recommendations. I had a 200-in-one, but the more impressive projects on it required so many wires it was nigh-impossible to get things to stay working. Put one in and two fall out.
You can start with one of those kits, but once you get to the point where you'll really learn what you're doing, go look for books and kits separately. Look for books by Forrest Mims III and Don Lancaster (TTL Cookbook and CMOS Cookbook are classics). Check their sites out as well.
As for parts sources, for online shopping, I'd recommend Digi-Key. Jameco is a little pricey, but they have some really interesting parts, including a lot of older stuff. All Electronics is a place I used to buy from a lot; they have a lot of manufacturer surplus parts, so it's kind of like shopping in a flea market or surplus auction. Another surplus shop is MPJA. Newark and Mouser are good places to look when you want some specific part that Digi-Key doesn't have.
For starters, you'll want to buy a modular breadboard, and one of the pre-cut wire kits for them. Or, if you want to blow some more dough, you might want to get one of the Analog Design Lab or Digital Design Lab things that has a bunch of things like power supplies, LEDs, and switches integrated into it already. Also look for parts assortments, like resistor and capacitor assortments (e.g. Digi-Key items RS125-ND and PHD1-KIT-ND). If you're going to be doing digital work, you'll probably want to get lots (20 or so) of 10K resistors (for pullups) and 0.1 uF capacitors (for decoupling).
Radio Shack is where you go as a last resort. Their selection is lousy and prices are worse.
I've always been a fan of the "Engineer's Mini-Notebook" series from Forrest Mims. You can get them at Radio Shack, most HAM radio shops or online here. (were originally like 10 books, they've now condensed them down to 4)
Entry-level electronics projects with detailed explanations and parts lists. You'll have to get the parts yourself, but with companies liker Mouser, Graybar and Fry's, that shouldn't be a problem.
So you are saying I need a kit to build a KITT - Knight Industries Two Thousand ?
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While I dug the Radio Shack ones, and my runner up was the previously mentioned 200 in 1, for sheer fun, my favorite was the Gakken EX 150 system. Everything was inside little blocks that you fit together. The manual was not something I would call stand-alone though, nor should it be. If you want to learn more, you start digging into Forrest M. Mims' books. You can't expect a toy manual, regardless of level of detail, to explan PNP versus NPN.
Seeing this post took me back to the many mis-spent hours of my youth, tinkering with electronics and magnets. If my son, when he's ten, asks for an oil furnace transformer, you can bet I'll be asking what he's planning on building (I was building a jacob's ladder).
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I'm surprised no one has mentioned Microprocessor kits!
I understand it's a little bit different than the poster's request, but they're great for entry level learning about electronics too!
You can find them on eBAY for great prices, and can be used for all kinds of really interesting projects.
Just to plug one example that I've used to tutor a few children, do a google search for "Basic Stamp" by parallax. Parallax also makes a chip with a Java interpreter in it, and all kinds of really interesting peripherals
They were called "junk TV sets". The "manual" was the ARRL Handbook.
Just buy a solderless breadboard, some parts, a power supply, a meter, and some books and start messing around. Circuit simulation software can be cool, too. Some packages:
gnucap - GNU Circuit Analysis package
klogic - digital circuit editor and simulator for KDE
ksimus - KDE tool for simulating electrical circuits
ktechlab - circuit simulator for microcontrollers and electronics
qucs - Quite Universal Circuit Simulator
There are also simulators, assemblers, and compilers for many one-chip micros.
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I don't recall exactly which kit I had, but I loved it when I was a kid. I think I was 11 when I got my first kit, which was a crystal radio set. The second kit was one of the 100-in-1 kits, and included a simple digital readout and some relays among the standard parts. The thing is-- you weren't really limited to 100 projects, because once you started to understand some of the patterns, and once you learned some of the basic concepts (Ohm's Law, and so on), you could come up with your own designs. I used my kit as a starting point for my high school science fair project (a science fair that I won); later in the project I moved to experimenter sockets and then breadboard. Once I found out that I could build my own guitar effects pedals based on designs found on the internet (this is c. 1995), I was hooked! The nice thing about these kits (or mine, at least), is that the contacts we're all spring-loaded, and the wire ends were already silvered, so it made playing with the stuff really easy. Highly, highly recommended.
Another option, as has been pointed out twice so far, is to start to learn amateur radio.
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I still see a lot of the older Radio Shack kits on eBay, often in decent condition with their original manuals, selling at very reasonable prices. My favorite as a kid was the 150-in-1 model from the late 70s-early-80s timeframe. Every card-carrying adult geek has his or her own "Rosebud," and the 150-in-1 kit is probably mine.
It's probably the most fun you can have for $15-$20, unless you already happen to live in a seedy part of Bangkok.
Depending upon the age of the child, you might want to consider the Snap Circuits line of electronics learning kits. I got the 500-in-one Pro version for my seven-year-old (now nine), and it worked out quite well.
The thing comes as a flat clear plastic board with little nubs on it, like Lego. Then there are a number of flat snap-on pieces with various electronics components on them. Included are just about anything you could imagine, up to and including some specialized DSP chips to help the kids experiment with weird sounds.
The booklet(s) that come with the kit are quite detailed. They go over how to build a circuit, and encourage the child to try and figure out what's going to happen before they actually put the pieces together. Then it goes on to describe what's happening in good simple language.
It's hard to gauge exactly how much my son has learned from this set, but I think he's got some of the basic ideas down, and it should help a bit when he gets older and starts dealing with more of the real thing. I highly recommend it for the younger children, not least of which for the party-colored pieces and ease of assembly and disassembly.
I'm not an actor, but I play one on television.
That was the exact model of electronics kit I had as a kid. I remember it as being pretty good. Interested me enough that I went on to study electronics to university level.
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I'm a 37 year old software engineer. About 3 years ago I decided I wanted to learn about electronics. I started with one of these. It was nice, and had some very nice example projects - both analog and digital. It also came with a nice supply of op-amps, transistors, resistors, capacitors, and other goodies.
The only complaint I might proffer is that I very quickly outgrew the relatively small breadboard and graduated to something like this. I was infinitely more pleased with the layout. If you enjoy it, a breadboard and a small arsenal of nicely varied resistors, transistors, caps, diodes, and other bits will be an excellent choice. If you start getting them in any significant quantity, look online. Radio Shack is nice and convenient, but does charge a bit of a markup.
Also, if you want to really blow your mind, pick up a copy of The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill. It was recommended by a coworker who is an MSEE, is mind-bogglingly good, and is used in lots of college courses.
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This isn't a basic electronics kit, but Parallax sells some starter kits with their BASIC Stamp microcontroller. They have a built in breadboard and some basic components. They have a large number of excellent manuals online which can be downloaded for free. Download some of the manuals and/or school curriculum to see if it might meet your needs.
noted.
They've definitely moved away from the electronic-component store to a much more consumer electronics store. I still go there to get basic soldering supplies, fuses and the occasional coax connector and to their credit they carry a few basic components, but few and far between. However, it seems the only way to get most electronic components from them is through their website. I've switched to a local electronic supply company for most of the electronic components I need.
This gives rise to all sorts of interesting uses. A simple trick involving Kirchhoff's Current Law allows an op-amp, with two or three resistors, to act as a simple gain amplifier with great input, output, and bandwidth performance. Add capacitors in the feedback loop, and you can exploit the exponential characteristics of the capacitor and build a circuit to model differential equations -- you can use these amplifiers to perform operations like differentiation and integration. These are the famous "analog computers" of the 40's-60's which so diligently simulated missile trajectories. Sum or subtract as many inputs as you want.
On the inside, op-amps of today usually have a differential input stage to provide high input impedance and voltage gain, followed by one internal stage of high voltage gain, followed by an output stage to provide high current gain to provide a low-impedance output. Field-effect transistors (FETs) are usually used in the input stage, due to their naturally near-infinite input resistance. High frequency amps sometimes require the use of traditional bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) due to their better HF characteristics (a result of lower internal capacitance); BJTs have significant input current, and care must be taken both by the designer and the engineer to drive them properly.
In short: op-amps are really easy to use and cheap as dirt. Any time someone wants to make a signal louder and not deal with a whole lot of fuss, the op-amp is the natural choice.
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I like the idea of the 500-in-1 kits, and have used a couple for education purposes (I volunteer as a technology teacher for primary education courses.) The nice thing with the kits is that everything's tested, so if you do the experiment as listed, it will work. They also often have safety stuff built in: the LED's have current-limiting resistors integral to the LED so you can't burn them out.
If the student isn't particularly motivated, is a sort of passive person, the 500-in-1 kits make a lot of sense. But if the student is motivated, buy all the Forest Mims Shop Notes notebooks -- the ones Radio Shack used to sell -- and go to jameco.com and buy some protoboard (get a big one, spend the money, you won't regret it -- or buy about 10 of the small 20-pin ones -- and just work your way through the notebooks. Start with basic, then do logic, sensors, 555/comparator/opamps, and so on. Mims has better explanations than most 500-in-1 manuals, because he's writing for adults not kids, and does some really interesting, funny things like lightning detectors and multi-output function generators that are surprisingly useful. Because the notebooks are all standalones he doesn't do as much building on previous work as you can do in a 500-in-one, but he spends more time exploring the math and physics behind what's going on.
And then go buy Hill and Horowitz, "The Art Of Electronics", and read it, and you can get a job as an electronics technician.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
If this is for younger kids, I would recommend one of the spring-and-wire kits, like the Elenco ones at Amazon (e.g., the MX-907). The components stay put, which is nice. For older kids (or yourself), I'd recommend one of the hybrid breadboard kits, like the Radio Shack one that has been mentioned several times. These are nice because you can customize them by adding new components (e.g., timers, digital logic ICs, etc), plus you get to work with a breadboard from the beginning, which is a useful skill.
Two things:
1) You almost never see one used without negative feedback (which just means there's a way for some or all of its output voltage to find its way back to its inverting input).
2) By varying the voltage at its output pin, an opamp with negative feedback will do whatever it takes, subject to its DC and AC specs, to make the voltage at its - input equal to whatever voltage is applied to its + input.
That's 99% of it. No, really.
Opamps are cool because it's easy to apply negative feedback to them. Negative feedback is probably the most important principle in electronics, after Ohm's Law.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
from our conversation.
"Heathkit".
Damn, I miss that company.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
When I was a kid, 3 decades ago(!), my father bought an electronics blocks kit that was imported from Germany to Japan. It was a great kit because each component was mounted on a block which had schematic representations of wires and components imprinted on the top. It was easy to compare the schematic in the guidebook to the components that you placed in the carrier, and when you were done, you could easily take your finished project around the house and use it.
And the thing looked much cooler than the springs-inserted-into-cardboard kits.
One nice thing about this system -- when you were finished, the imprint on the blocks formed nice schematics and looked neat. Not like the ratsnest that you get with the less expensive 500-in-1 kits.
I found an example of the product at http://www.laserballs.com/teb.htm -- I don't know if they are still available. But I think it's a fantastic product.
a tutorial on radio theory with practical experiments. Think of it as a grown-up's version (you are a grown-up, right?) of the 500-in-1 manual. It's based on an existing design, a transceiver kit from Small Wonder Labs, and so you can read it and do experiements with with your own parts or with the kit. [A ham license to use these kits no longer requires a morse code test, just a 35-question written Technician exam.]
WA5ZNU
>"Heathkit". Damn, I miss that company.
Try Elecraft.
http://www.allelectronics.com/cgi-bin/item/PB-400/ 105/BREADBOARD,_400_CONTACTS_.html
Get yourself a couple of good project books at the library, find a local electronics shop and buy a battery holder and a few parts and some hookup wire and go to town. Smaller, cheaper, and you won't grow out of it so quick-- those 500 kits have about 485 projects that you could care less about, and after you build the ultra-simple blinky light, and AM crystal radio, electronic organ and a couple others you'll tire of it before you get your money's worth.
With a couple of these breadboards you can get some IC specs (or find them on the net) and hook up gates, counters, LEDs, Op amps, oscillator chips, transistors, etc.., and build an unlimited amount of stuff with them. You'll only grow out of it when you want to get a soldering iron and build something to keep...
Sorry, but your comparison is just plain wrong. The electronics kits really do provide a fun and useful way to learn about circuitry.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Oh wow, these are so much fancier than when I was a kid (which honestly, was not that long ago).
Mine was some gray plastic with some shiny holes. Yet it did so much.
Turns out everything is all about marketing. But that concept isn't anything new.
Here's a manual to the old Radio Shack 10 in 1 kit. Shame she didn't put together a parts list to go with it.
http://mamegrrl.homestead.com/
And some good books on both analog and digital theory.
So for a couple hundred bucks you have a virtually unlimited 'electronic kit'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The problem with the kits is that they are limiting. Get one to see if you're really interested in electronics, and if so, then get a solderless breadboard system. Here's one with a triple power supply built in: http://www.allelectronics.com/cgi-bin/item/PB-4060 /105/POWERED_BREADBOARD_.html
/ 105/140_PIECE_JUMPER_WIRE_ASSORTMENT_.html
Pre-formed jumper wires: http://www.allelectronics.com/cgi-bin/item/JW-140
Add a $15 DMM, then trot down to your library and grab a couple of Forest Mims books. Go nuts.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
Archer Electronics makes bread boards that are set up with a contact strip below so that simple circuits can be set up. There are battery terminals at the top that can also be connected to a power supply. I use an multilead AC adapter and can usually select the voltage I want without using a potentiometer.Then you can get a copy of MAKE and try some of the simpler projects. Just buy the components you need or better yet cannibalize some old junk.They sell wires prebent to fit into the breadboards and their insulation is color coded by length very convenient and the color coding helps a lot in looking over your connections for mistakes.
When I was a kid, I was desperate for one of those '500 in 1 Kits', but instead my grandfather and a neighbor who an electrician, gave me a small 25 Watt soldering iron, an ac/dc train transformer for a power supply and a bunch of old parts they had lying around. Next to playing D and D, I probably spent more time messing about with stuff as a kid than anything. After a few months of mucking about, my grandfather also have a small multimeter. I definitely think those kits are good, but learning to solder is an integral part of building practically any electronic device. I also found soldering to be a lot of fun. On the surface handing an 11 year old a soldering iron may not seem like the safest thing in the world, but if you teach them how to use it safely, and they are reasonably responsible it should be fine. Plus, after you burn yourself the first time I guarantee it won't happen again. I had everyone of those Forst-Mims project books from Radio Shack, and I would say anything along those lines would be fantastic for a kid to start learning about electronics. You might also want to check out BEAM, which is a branch of very simple robotics, that uses cheap parts to make functional little bots.
Et In Arcadia Ego
To be honest, as a kid I never found the "500 in 1" kits to be up to scratch, but maybe that was just me.
:(
A good textbook a decent breadboard and a good selection of components would be far more useful IMO.
My first ever book was Adventures with Electronics which was fun, but didn't really explain what happened well enough, so I'd combine it with something by M.W. Brimicombe to explain the why's and wherefore's (mine was a GCSE textbook) - unfortunately I can't track down the exact title as it seems to be out of print
Moving upwards though the book of choice has to be The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill - it's excellent!
As a kid my father bought me the Kosmos electronic X 1000.
This thing was phenomenal. The manual is written in a very witty way and describes an adventure between Professor Sparky and his assistant Andy. It was honestly written for an 8 year old but at the time that's how old I was.
The explanations break down the circuits in easy terms, but not only do they describe each project in an easy way but they also include actual electronic diagrams.
The kit contained a basic breadboard, and the parts were actual transistors, resistors and capacitors, along with a speaker, some LED's and a few special diodes.
There was a bit of basic setup. You were instructed to bend the wires on the various components just right so they locked into the breadboard perfectly. The transistors were hard wired onto a four prong circuit board for this purpose.
I can't say enough how perfect this kit was... I still have the booklet sans cover and still use it to this day for small electronic projects. I had a friend who got one of those Radio Shack coil wire jobs and after a few days of being quite frustrated with it we ended up removing all the components and using them on my basic breadboard.
It would appear this company is still in buisness. And on Kosmos' website they list an Abenteuer Wissen Elektronik kit which by the picture seems very similar. I just downloaded the pictures they have there and these are the same components but it seems a little less then my kit had. There more advanced kits seem to be done in the same spirit (actual components, breadboard like design.)
If there products are 10% the kit I had as a kid then it's still 3000% better then any RatShack POS.
That's not really true. If I show you a few Lego bricks, and maybe snap them together for you once, you basically ought to be able to grasp the concept of putting them together into arbitrary configurations in order to make anything you desire. Strength of material and molecular dynamics are not required in order to understand the key principles of operation, namely, that the bumps on top of the bricks stick into the bottoms of other bricks and they hold themselves together.
However, if I were to give you a simple electronic circuit, particularly one made with active components, it wouldn't be obvious in the slightest what was going on. Even an AM crystal radio receiver, for instance, requires at least a basic understanding of electricity and electromagnetism in order to grasp at all. (And if you replace the crystal with a transistor, it's even harder.) Otherwise, it's just a magic bunch of junk that makes funny noises out of the air. While someone without any understanding may be able to put together a radio, they're just following a recipe and trusting that someone smarter than them has got the details worked out. As an instructional tool, such "cookbooks" are dangerous, because they teach students to be passive.
Teaching about electricity is fundamentally more difficult than teaching about other basic sciences, because it's one of the first things students run into which can only be measured indirectly (well, for the most part -- I guess you can experience some electricity directly, e.g. Van de Graaf generators or sticking a 9V battery to one's tongue, or unfortunate accidents involving wall plugs and hairpins, but none of these demonstrations really give that much insight into the nature of the beast: they're not like looking at a Lego). It can really only be understood through abstract models and analogies, which can be occasionally confirmed by observation via equipment. Making that jump, from direct observation and understanding, to observation -> model -> prediction -> testing -> understanding, is pretty huge.
Of course, it's possible to go too far to the other end of the spectrum, too. It's a common problem in physics (probably common elsewhere, but my field in school was physics) for people to believe that their understanding of certain mathematical models has given them insight into how the Universe actually operates, when in reality this is almost certainly not so; the models are just that, models, which happen to be good at predicting things under certain conditions, and therefore must have some relation to objective truth, but they are not it. A ball doesn't sit there calculating x(t)=(1/2)at^2+vt+x_0 before it falls to the ground; the equation is just a way of predicting reality. If you ask a physicist "why does a ball fall towards the ground," and they start writing that on a chalkboard, they've drunk the Kool-aid. (Not that you can really fault them; the 'real' answer to that question is ridiculously complex, and would open up the subject of subatomic particles and gravitons, and probably lead directly into a lot of questions that don't have satisfactory answers to the best of our current knowledge. So in a way, one might argue that the physicist only starts to lie and give their pat algebraic answer, because it's what everyone wants to hear, the truth -- that we don't and may never know what is objectively true on a fundamental level -- being so disconcerting.) But the point is that there is some physical reality underlying the equations, and the equations themselves aren't it. Sometimes, students are presented with equations as if they are reality itself, and this is at best lazy, and at worst intellectually dishonest.
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Get the Radio Shack Electronic Learning Lab (#28-280). The manual was written (and kit designed?) by Forrest Mims. It doesn't get any better than that. I got my son one.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.