Slashdot Mirror
Best Electronics Kits For Adults?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm an adult looking to learn how electronics work and have some fun building projects. But all the kits I've found online are for kids 8-10 years old, and they don't really explain the principles — they just color-code where to place components on boards. Are there any kits aimed at adults? I know if anyone has got the answer, it's this community."
http://www.heathkit.com/ i remember my father made a bunch of things many years ago, like an oscilliscope and such.
mod me funny
It's been a long time since I built a Heathkit, do they still make them? My two favorites were my sixty watt guitar amplifier and my ham radio reciever; this was in the last '60s when I was a teenager.
But you're not really going to learn about electronics by building stuff from kits. Read books; when you have the theory then you can get the kits and will understand what's going on with them.
The library is your friend. It's often better than Google and Wikipedia combined.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
If you want to know about digital electronics and microprogramming, try a Nerdkit.
Electronics Learning Lab Designed by Forrest Mims and sold by radio shack.
You could also do with picking up his Getting Started in Electronics book. It is like a field journal for electrical theory, very fun read.
Hope that points you in the right direction.
-Scott
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
I've been having fun buying and building the various kits available from http://www.adafruit.com/ . You need to solder to do them, but that's really really easy.
The Arduino projects are particularly cool (the ethernet and the WAV shields are cheap and fun) so you can do electronics as well as program microprocessors.
Velleman has a bunch of kits too; many are for little kids, but I built an interesting USB breakout kit (USB control of a bunch of output and input lines).
What a strange bird is the pelican, his beak can hold more than his belly can.
The old HeathKits, like oscilliscopes and ham radios, were of value as exercises in assembly and part identification. Beyond getting a general sense of what the circuitry was about, I never learned anything about electronics from building such stuff.
I was going to say that. Start off with a breadboard, wires, LEDs, and some logic gates, then move up from there. Kits often have the problem of not having something crucial, and making it hard to incorporate things that aren't included with the kit.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Great projects that encompass all types of electronics. My favorite place to find kits! http://www.makershed.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=20 Enjoy! Slewfoot
Most book stores I've been in have a poor selection of such material. Look for Getting Started in Electronics by Forest Mims and then look for Practical Electronics for Inventors. For components, just kit yourself out as needed from online supplies (Mouser, Digikey, Jameco, Newark, etc).
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Here you go, not a kit but plenty to read and learn. This is where I would start and once you understand it, pick a project and build it from scratch.
http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/
Once you have the understanding, you can create printed circuit boards with Eagle (free for non-commercial use)
http://www.cadsoftusa.com/
and have Sparkfun order your PCBs via BatchPCB
http://www.batchpcb.com/
This is how I got into building my own robots, not the ones from kits but scratch build by ordering the parts and doing my own designs.
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
Whew!
Glad I'm not the only one who looked at the title and thougt "W00T! FEMBOTS!"
Of course, the rest of it was kind of a letdown. Ah well. I guess learning electronics and circuit soldering is it's own reward.
Even if there is no sweet sweet robot girl loving involved.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Just an FYI, Radioshack Stores are moving away from being the parts store we all loved. They are now trying to be more competitive in Cell Phones and Satellite dishes. You can thank their CEO for this. It's not very easy to find a Radioshack that still has a lot of parts in stock, let alone kits.
It's best to order it online as most stores won't have what you're looking for. Also another idea is to call up your local colleges who offer courses. They often sell kits or can tell you where their students buy kits. Those places ALWAYS have additional info.
The project lists can range from simple circuits to digital electronics. Learning how to build your own Amplifier for your stereo you quickly realize what massive profit margins these companies have, and you start to wonder why medical equipment that performs simple functions costs tens of thousands of dollars.
In the Good Old Days, we had Heathkit, Eico Kits, and Knight Kits (Allied Radio). The last kit that I built was a Heath AR1500 AM/FM Stereo receiver that I purchased in 1972. It's still running today.
Today, there's not much out there. The local hobby store sells simple kits from Velleman http://www.vellemanusa.com/us/enu/product/list/?id=523008 but these don't compare to the kits of the 60s & 70s.
I guess that's it's a lot cheaper to buy the product assembled and tested from China than it is to build your own.
The ARRL handbook is a good source of do it yourself electronic projects geared toward Amateur Radio.
Learning electronics is easier with a project that means something to you. I'm into photography, so I learned by building a sound trigger for my camera for high speed photography.
You can get kits containing the components you need here: http://www.hiviz.com/
And use them to make pictures like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bernieandjude/2578082432/
The kit comes with instructions and a circuit diagram. All else you need is a book like Starting Electronics by Keith Brindley to help you interpret the diagram.
foo mane padme hum
Seriously. The kits have nice big, brightly coloured bits which are physically large and easy to handle. They are also relatively hard to break. You don't really need those featues. Instead, get a good beginners book, for instance by Forest M. Mimms III, a solderless breadbroad, and then buy the components mentioned in the book. You can then start assembling them on the breadboard.
For what it's worth, I'd duggest the following:
Several reels of 100 metal film resistors, 100OHm, 1K, 10K, 100K and 1M.
A bag of brestripped, tinned and finished wires of various lengths for breadboard prototyping.
A reel of single core wire (for when the premade ones won't quite stretch).
Several bags of capacitors (100p 1n 10n 100n ceramic, polyester, mica or mylar and 1u 100u and 1000u in electrolytic). You want maybe 20 of the smaller ones and 10 of the larger ones.
A nice big bag of cheap transistors. These are a little trickier, but all of the low priced ones will be similar. You probably want something like 20 small ones like BC108 (NPN, low power) a corresponding PNP one and 5 medium power ones like BFY51.
10 cheap LEDs
1 Buzzer
1 loudspeaker
A good powersupply. You won't need more than 1Amp, but you probably want 0--15V variable, and 2 outputs if you can manage it. This is the mist expensive part, but you could just get a 9V wall wart if this is a problem. Batteries get annoying quite fast.
This will set you up way better than a kit.
You can also add to it later. You can buy a rail of 741 op amps (indestructible, and still popular even though they're 20 years obsoloete) and 555 oscillator chips. Later still you can get some logic ICs.
Plase, slashdotters weigh in, because I've missed something here.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I totally sympathize with you. I'm always looking for stuff to build but there really isn't much complex out there. I would love a little 16 bit computer or something. Something like the replica 1 only more complicated.
Of what I've built, there is one and only one answer. The ultimate kit, the best out there, the Elecraft K2. I've built that, the KPA100 power amplifier, the KAT100 tuner, and a few little modules for it. It took me weeks to build it all. It was amazing.
Kit building is why I got into Ham Radio. The only problem is... I don't seem to care about the rest of ham radio. I haven't operated much. I keep meaning to do more to see if I like it better, but I don't seem to care enough to get around to it. I'm thinking of selling my K2 since it's just sitting around.
Other than that there are a few kits out there. A Nixie tube clock, while not too complicated, looks interesting. I ran across an all transistor clock kit the other day. It looks quite neat.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Yeah I agree. I did the same when starting out and that's half the fun. A basic kit you buy will almost always contain a bread board, a power supply, some wire, and some basic elements like LEDs. All of these can be found in one trip to radio shack with little effort.
For instance here could be a basic kit:
- Bread board
- 6V-12V power supply. I prefer the ones that allow you to choose amperage
- pack of LEDS. Blue LEDS are purdy
- Wire. Radio shack and others sell wire "kits"of different lengths or a spool.
- Basic multimeter. Great for when things don't work
- pack of components. Transistors, resistors, capacitors, etc. And of course the whole reason I do this - some nice 8 bit chips.
Again, all of this stuff can be bought in a quick trip to radio shack. Once you get the basics you can dig into the real online "part bins" like DigiKey.com or Mouser.com.
The entire US Navy Electricity & Electronics Training Series (NEETS) is online in PDF book format here:
http://www.phy.davidson.edu/instrumentation/NEETS.htm
This explains virtually every part of electronics you could possibly want.
(Bonus: as it was produced by the US government, there is no copyright; download, read, print, copy, etc. as much as you'd like.)
This signature intentionally left unblank.
Going back 40 years, HeathKit and to a lesser degree Radio Shack were the big names in home electronics kits. Projects ranged from simple amplifiers and AM radios to electronic organs and TV's.
Going back about 35 years with the dawn of the microcomputers, IMASI and ALTAIR were branded kits. I was very surprised to see that IMSAI is still around: www.imsai.net For that matter, you can still build an Altair 8800 using NOS (new old stock) www.altairkit.com
Moving into the early 80's, the Timex Sinclair made a 4 chip z80 set. Believe it or not, you can still buy that one too. www.zebrasystems.com
About that time we also tried out an OKI Semiconductor evaluation kit for a digital PCM encoder (think digital answering machines, voice recorders). You can check the various semiconductors manufacturers who publish evaluation kits, sometimes with sample projects for a slightly more advanced challenge.
To save yourself frustration and headaches later, DON'T START SOLDERLESS! Learn how to solder first! Flow solder down a long wire. Strip parts out of a circuit board and put them back in without damaging them, without burning the board and checking with a magnifying glass that you don't have any solder tips that cross over onto the neighboring point. Get comfortable removing whole chips using both solder wick and a solder-sucker. Learn the components of solder so you're not wondering why you're leaving "tan stuff" (resin) on the board. Cut several parallel 'wires' on a circuit board and then fix it with solder and a single strand of copper wire ... if you learn how to solder first you'll save yourself the frustration of knowing how to fix a problem but lacking the actual skill to do so.
I'd look around for kits aimed at high school students. My senior year of high school I took an electronics course where we had to put together a radio from a kit. The good thing about a radio is that there's a lot of cans that need tweaking and points that need to be seen on an oscilloscope to get everything properly calibrated. In fact, this is the kit I used (note that I'm not endorsing the seller. I just happened across the product is all).
I'd go ahead and pick up an electronics text book geared toward college students as well.
...and start memorizing that v=i*r starting now.
Seriously - make your own kit.
You need:
- Plug in solderless breadboard. Get something reasonably big.
- An assortment of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Many suppliers sell bags of common values for these.
- Some transistors: get some NPN and PNP small signal bipolar transistors. Get some N and P channel small signal MOSFETs.
- A few 555 timer ICs.
- A handful of 74-series logic ICs (typical quad gates, flip flops, shift registers).
And of course a whole heap of LEDs. You need some blinkenlights when learning.
With this you can look at the 'net - for example, while reading 'Lessons in Electric Circuits' http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/ you can devise circuits to expand your knowledge on what you've just read.
You also need at least a reasonable multimeter. As you start getting into stuff that oscillates at more than a few hertz, and if you are enjoying what you're doing, it's worth looking on ebay for a reasonable 2nd hand oscilloscope.
As you get more advanced, you can get microcontrollers, for example, get some Atmel AVR 8 bit microcontrollers - they are supported by GCC and you can make your own parallel programmer with an old printer lead and 4 resistors. Or build a proper computer with external memory - the Z80 microprocessor is still made, and is cheap, and is great for tinkering because it is a 'static' design and run at sub 1Hz clock frequencies where you can see what's happening by putting LEDs on the data and address bus.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I don't know if this has come up already, but there's a handy online circuit simulator here:
www.falstad.com/circuit
You can create circuits from scratch or load and play with a large library of existing circuits. I used it a lot in grad school when I had to build something electronic for the lab, just to make sure it was going to do what I expected.
All stated opinions are subject to further review
Heathkits were good for learning physically working with electronics. Soldering irons, pin identification, mechanical assembly, but didn't really teach theory.
The 150 and 200-in-1 radio shack kits actually did a fairly good job of this. They started you out with "connect the numbered terminals, here's a picture", to later replacing the picture of the parts with a schematic. They encouraged you to experiment, and there was accompanying text for each project later on that described what was going on in the circuit so you understood what all the parts were doing.
It didn't teach you electronics theory formally in any kind of structured way, but it was an excellent crash-course in basic electronics. It was also a very quick way to teach you how to read, use, and create schematics. There are still 200-in-1 kits available but not by Archer anymore: http://www.quasarelectronics.com/epl200.htm
There really are 200 different projects in that kit, ranging from very very basic, "press the switch to turn on the light" all the way up to "a divide-by-2 counter" and "build your own one way telephone". It teaches the basics of digital computing at the gate level which is interesting. Also there was a very wide variation in the projects. Something interesting for everyone. Photodetector alarms, simple games, noisemakers, just all sorts of variety to keep a kid interested.
Once you want to really start fiddling, this is something you should have. It doesn't teach you anything in itself, but lets you play more: Heathkit ET-3100 electronic design experimenter: http://providence.craigslist.org/ele/696855286.html
I had one of these and it's very basic, but by this point you should have some spare parts around already, and having adjustable voltages and signals and a breadboard takes you to the next step of design. Actually I think it did come with some projects, it's been awhile. This was a kit, so you had to assemble it properly for it to work. I used to spend my free time at school planning out schematics of things I wanted to tinker with, sometimes preplanning how to lay them out on the breadboard when I got home.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
For the basics, you can earn your Amateur Radio Licenses. They require you learn some basic electronic principles that are beyond most of the kits.
I have played with the kits and they did not help. What I had to know to earn my amateur extra radio license required more knowledge. No morse code anymore, just 3 multiple choice licenses where all the questions are published.
What you learn is also specific to radios. Filters, amplifiers( sound and power), transmitter and receiver circuits. You learn what it means to apply Kirchhoff's laws. Also to put resistors, capacitors and inductors in serial or parallel configurations. The basics of analyzing power through circuits.
The basic books from amazon work well with the kits from radio shack. Make sure what you get has a breadboard. So I do not think that the snap electronics kits are good for adults. At the makers fair, there was the kit from sparkle labs, http://kits.sparklelabs.com/. The initial parts from sparkle labs are great, but the instructions are bad. But this kit, along with purchasing a reasonable digital multimeter and a book from amazon would be a great start. The kits sold by make magazine are excellent, http://www.makershed.com/. Make magazine is also a great resource,http://makezine.com/magazine/.
For the meter, spend the $50 for one that will test your components, resistors, capacitors, diodes and transistors also.
If you dive in and buy a soldering iron, do not cheap out. Spend the $40 for the basic Weller red soldering station or $110 for the basic blue station. Buy a pointy tip, $5. The chisel tip that comes with it is not good for soldering boards.
There are plenty of books that cover the topic with sample circuits. Look at the books offered at http://arrl.org./
A book "Hand's On Radio Experiments" is an excellent book. It publishes the first 60 articles written for ARRL's QST magazine. You can also buy a kit with all the parts needed to do the experiments. The book (http://www.arrl.org/catalog/?item=1255) and the parts kit (http://www.arrl.org/catalog/?item=1255K) is $100 from the ARRL.
Most of the above covers analog electronics. For digital electronics, there is a lot of support for digital electronics. The basic stamp kits are great for that. They sell very proven kits, http://www.parallax.com/ with very well written manuals that will take more than a weekend to go through. Also through the make magazine site you'll find project sites for other micro processors used by hobbyists.
Also, to have guided lessons, a class with lab at the local community college is also a great way to go if you have the time. After all the long winded crap above, if you really want to learn and want more than to look at a board and know what the parts are, this is probably the best way to go. Either way, depending on the depths of the knowledge you are looking for, it is between months and a couple years of learning.
Hope I see you at a booth selling a kit at the maker faire in a couple of years.
Long ass winded sermon over.
I actually bought and built one of those Sinclair ZX-81 kits back in the day! I was just a young pup at the time and I was hella enthusiastic about starting right away when the package (assembly instructions, PCB, chips, various little baggies of resistors and caps, etc. etc.) arrived one bright and sunny day.
My Dad told me "wait until the weekend when your brother can help you ... this is a complicated kit," but I wasn't having any of that and I got started soldering right away. All in all and considering my tender age, I think I did a pretty good job except for one fatal flaw: I soldered a 9-pin resistor pack onto the board backwards. Then, in attempting to fix the problem (using nothing but my unbridled enthusiasm and a roll of desoldering braid purchased from Radio Shack) I managed to pull the traces up off a portion of the PCB. At that point, the mess was officially beyond my (or my brother's) skill to fix.
The solution involved mailing the entire kit away to a repair depot and waiting for many, many, many weeks until they returned the machine (in working condition) along with a substantial bill for the repair work.
The fact I can remember so many details about this episode - right down to the number of pins on the ill-fated resistor pack or the exact spot on the living room carpet where I laid down newspapers in order to do my work - is testament to just how valuable these little experiences are for a young mind.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I learned electronics as an adult. Beginning electronics books found in the library is an excellent place to start. Check many library branches and suburban nearby districts. Often you can get a library card for the suburban district libraries with a central city card at no charge.
Some other suggestions:
>Get a cheap digital voltmeter for about $20. Invaluable.
>Download several of the sound-card oscilloscope programs floating around on the web. Many of them have poor quality user-interfaces and documentation, but nearly all of them work on low-frequency AC signals like audio.
> Get an inexpensive soldering iron and salvage/recycle parts from junk electronics, especially old electronics that used through-hole components. A spring-loaded plastic tube solder-sucker used to remove solder from joints on recycled/used circuit boards is quite useful. A solder-less 'breadboard' where components can be connected to make temporary test circuits is handy. Sometimes community college students in software have to take electronics classes to graduate. They have to buy component kits for labs. After finishing the class, they show their contempt for these electronics classes by selling their supplies for super-cheap or by giving them away.
> Ask 'stupid' questions on 'beginner's' web sites. Ignore all the smart-ass 'stupid noobie' responses.
> Post a message on the local CraigsList for free surplus hobbyist electronic components. You might meet local people who can direct you to local inexpensive parts-sources and assistance.
> Be open to exploring microcontrollers. There's a real learning curve, but they are now very cheap and flexible. I recommend exploring the Atmel AVR family. I strongly discourage using the Microchip PIC, because they are a pain in the neck to program, and are not very cheap. The AVR chips can be programmed directly through the PC parallel port.
> Most electronic manufacturers will give free samples of their parts if you ask them. It is standard practice in the electronics industry to get free samples to build a prototype of a new product, and then buy thousands of the chips when the product goes into production. You can use your work e-mail address to convince the electronics manufacturers that this is your plan with the samples.
> Eagle makes a great free software package for creating schematic drawings of your circuits and, as you advance, for designing a printed circuit board. Google for more info and download site.
> Several companies now make small numbers of small-sized professional quality circuit boards for $35-50. These 'board-houses' are invaluable for use with tiny surface-mount components and integrated circuits that the electronics industry is standardizing on.
I hope that all this helps. I suggest focusing on a specific area that you find interesting. For several years I studied electric guitar effects pedals like fuzz/distortion, flangers, and echo/delays. The schematic circuits (and documentation on how the circuits work) for the older 1970s and 1980s effects are available on the web. Also you can get cheap knock-off clones of expensive effects on eBay for $15-$25 each. With a DIY signal generator (like a simple 555 timer), you can feed signals into these cheap effects clone boxes and use the free PC sound card oscilloscope programs to see how the circuitry is changing the signal through each stage of the effect.
Best of luck.
Elenco made all the old lab kits for Radio Shack. They still sell the spring-terminal ones. Here's a page where they describe them: http://www.elenco.com/prolabs.htm They are VERY nice, and the upper-end ones have the schematics only (no numbered diagrams) in later experiments to encourage you to learn how to wire the circuits based upon schematics.
But a much, much better option is to buy this starter kit and learn the hot new Arduino instead of the aging Basic Stamp. You'll need to start a junk drawer of components, including resistor assortment like these four kits. Local Amateur Radio HamFests and eBay are both good places to fill out your junk box.
Some good resources:
o The Arduino Home Page
o Peter Anderson's Arduino page (the whole site is great, and most can be adapted to the Arduino)
o Sparkfun Tutorials (and don't miss out on their store that has all the good stuff)
o The Electronic Goldmine is a great resource for odd surplus electronics.
I've ordered a number of "Velleman" kits http://www.vellemanusa.com/ for various projects. They're quite similar to heathkits and others mentioned. The problem with kits like those is that they don't really teach you about electronics so much as they're just good soldering practice. A bit more professional and adult in execution than the wire+spring kits sold by rat-shack but just as empty in the theory it teaches.
.22mm silver bearing solder, a de-soldering iron, a nice set of helping hands, a nice set of miniature pliers, a nice set of cutters/strippers/crimps, and some 22ga stranded hookup wire. You'll spend about $50 and have pretty much everything you need to tackle any DIY electronics project. You should also consider spending a bit of cash on a good multimeter, which isn't necessary but HIGHLY recommended for troubleshooting or reverse engineering.
:)
If you're really interested in leaning about electronics the first thing you need to do is pick a project, pick something that someone else has already done and posted the schematics and other information about. Then head over to to this website Its the home page for a highschool electronics club but IMO it's some of the best info on the web on the basic theory about how electronics work as well as how to read diagrams, understand components and solder them together, everything you need to get started.
now you've got a project and some basic knowledge head over to a site like SparkFun loads of useful parts and kits to get you started on nearly any project. I order 99% of my parts from Digikey if they don't have it there you'd be hard pressed to find it elsewhere, it's not very beginner friendly though... Mouser Electronics is much more suited for beginners but their pricing is also a little higher and their selection not as good.
I didn't get into electronics until I was in college and I didn't study electronics in college at all. I basically just picked a project and then just did as much research and self teaching as I needed to get it done, then picked a harder project then a harder project until I am where I am today. I've actually had a couple of my custom electronics projects published in magazines and I only started learning this stuff about 6 or so years ago, not even knowing how to solder or what a resistor is. The resources above were invaluable though
Having good equipment is important too. Go to the rat-shack and buy their 15Watt iron, a spring stand with a sponge, some
Good Luck and have fun
Collector's Edition
Google for the name of the equipment, if it's a frequent/known problem you'll find repair instructions. BTW almost half of the salvaged stuff was repaired by replacing leaky/bulgy capacitors.
Yeah, there's a ton of variety out there. Good toy stores (like the one in my sig) have everything from those little block kits to the 500 in 1 electronic springboard kits (remember those). I think you might be looking for something a little more advanced.
I remember putting together a few kits from Ramsey Electronics, including the venerable FM10 stereo FM transmitter. They have a lot of interesting stuff there. Also Information Unlimited is a classic for fun stuff like high-voltage, etc.
Cool! Amazing Toys.