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Heathkit DIY Kits Are Coming Back
donberryman writes "IEEE Times reports that Heathkit, the fabled electronics kits company, is going back into that business after a two-decade hiatus. The Heathkit website says that they will be releasing Garage Parking Assistant kit (GPA-100) in late September followed by a Wireless Swimming Pool Monitor kit. Amateur radio kits may be coming by the end of the year."
I hope for real this time — I never saw for sale the HERO kit they promised a few years ago.
For reminding me I'm old today.
(I think its great they're coming back... but gone for 20 years?! Ugh. I made a lot of them when I was young!)
I was too young for these when they went out of business, but now I want some! This would be a great substitute for home chemistry kits which are now "too dangerous" for kids. A great tool for getting kids interested in science.
I still have a Heathkit multimeter that I built in the late 80's. Still works like a charm. I think I also have an LED clock sitting in a box in a closet somewhere.
I built a lot of their kits as a kid, from shortwave radios to speakerphones. My dad was a ham radio operator and he got me hooked on them. I'd love to see them make a comeback in this arena.
This could be great. My first SW radio was their HR-10B ham band receiver. It stayed alive from 1970 through 2008. If they put out a good general communications receiver, I'd be first in line. I don't suppose we'll see any more of the old crinkly green paint finishes, though, alas.
You know, I think there could be a good emerging market for DIY home control stuff...
I had to go and look at the wikipedia site for Heathkit, as the name sounded familiar but I couldn't place anything. Once I brought the pictures up though, memories of my dads work shop came flooding back to me and I recognized several of the kits that my dad had in there. He was an radio/electronics guy in the Coast Guard and a ham radio operator. If nothing else, thanks for some dredging up some fond memories of my father. :o)
Isn't that the guy who duplicates your house key and passes it to his buddy who burgles your house while you're in the restaurant?
rj
Have a look for Velleman and Sparkfun if you wish to tinker.
My first PC was a Heathkit H8. I remember soldering lots and lots of DIP sockets to the boards and putting the case, PSU and terminal together. The terminal, an H/Z-19, had a more powerful processor than the CPU itself. I also remember keying in programs through the front panel to test it out before I attached the floppy drive so I could boot CP/M.
Are they making kits in Benton Harbor? That town could sure use the help.
to do Friday nights while people with lives are out living it up.
Are there any Americans left who can soldier, or know the difference between a capacitor and their ass, or can tell you the first damn thing about analog circuits? Don't we all just push buttons with our thumbs on cell phones imported from Asia now?
It seems like the only technically inclined Americans any more are all over 50 or so. The younger crowd knows how to *use* technology, but they don't understand it for shit. This I can tell by talking to young people about their cell phones. They are "magic devices" to them.
Heathkit - they were a product of the times. Sad to say, I can't really imagine them selling more than a few kits to the geezer/nostalgia crowd these days. The younger folks don't want to *understand*. They just want to blindly buy and use.
My Heathkit IT-3117 vacuum tube tester still works great. When the tubes in my TV set need checking, I don't have to make a trip to Radio Shack.
Now get off my lawn, kid!
Have gnu, will travel.
And was hoping I could do a DIY tonsillectomy, since I don't have health insurance at my W2 contract McJob.
I always wanted to make the PDP11 kit, but could not afford it! Maybe I can now!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
GREAT memories of my best friend and me wiring a Heathkit Apache TX-1 amateur radio transmitter in the late 1950's. A wonderful experience, and led to me getting my ham licence, which I still hold. (And we wired one of the rectifiers in backwards, so I never WILL forget the smell of burned-out selenium!)
...numerous exploits by various idiot companies that have no or little relation to the time-honored companies of christmas past.
Wanna bet?
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Sweet! For the two-and-a-half years since I earned my Ham license, I have been singularly unable to find a kit for making a transmitter I could use. I can re-learn to read circuit diagrams, etc., but designing and building a radio from scratch is too far beyond my current skills.
I think you should get a TicKit
to ConnectiKit
and eat some BrisKit
then get a joint and SmoKit
before getting an AIDsKit
from HeathKit
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
I know what the submitter means... I'm holding out for a HERO too.
+++OUT OF CHEESE ERROR+++ REDO FROM START +++
PILLS HERE? O:
After all, Louis needs his pills. (L4D reference)
Bring back the H8!
TFA talked about the proliferation of cheap components post WWII that really made the kits practical from a cost perspective. With modern manufacturing technology all geared towards surface mount mass production, I wonder how easy it will be to find cheap components to use in the kits. Small surface mount parts are fine for manufacturing but it takes a lot more dexterity to solder them correctly than it does with the old through-hole technology. There's no way I want to even think about attaching a BGA socket on a board by hand.
Still, I would have a hard time believing that there is no demand for the through-hole components any more. Someone who knows more than I do should be able to tell me whether or not those are still available at a reasonable price these days.
Great stuff. Hopefully, they will not be using Chinese parts. I would pay more to get Western parts.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
My Signal Generator is a Heath Kit. It does 30khz to 100 Mhz with attenuation for testing signal stages of radios/tvs. You can have pure sine wave, or 3khz AM modulation. Pots on everything are still functional.
I have used it for testing FM stages, and MW stages. It still does 100Mhz, despite the fact that it runs 2 x ECC 83 thermionic valves. Obviously an excellent (if extremely old) design. Will this make it valuable?
...don't even know how to use a soldering iron. What's this world coming to? ;-)
People used to actually fix failed electronics back in the 60s...
Heh... I still fix failed electronics today! Just this past weekend I repaired my daughter's failed video card by replacing all of the crummy leaking and exploded electrolytic capacitors in the VRM circuit. I refuse to pitch an otherwise perfectly good card into the landfill just because a half-dozen 50 cent capacitors have decided to commit suicide.
Kits are cool, and welcome back Heatkit, but... to Management
A kit build safety system is a huge potential liability. Like kill your venture kind liability.
See Burt Rutan and homebuilt things that occasionally explode or cause fatalities (or failed to prevent)
A Z-19 and a US Robotics modem got me through graduate school in the early 1980's. Wrote most of my dissertation at home (in troff, yet).
I never had to modify the Z-19, but the Z80 processor would have been a piece of cake to hack if necessary.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Back in the early 50's (Korean war) I built my first kit (crystal set), and more in the following years, AM/FM/SW radio, reel to reel tape recorder, Morse HAM unit, I loved them!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
They advertised in the back of comic books. A couple dollars a month got a incremental kit every month for a year. The bulk of it was an electronic subsystem progressing through amplifiers until built a whole ham radio. I remember a dry ice cloud chamber too. Good enough to help me get into M.I.T.
I am jealous of what kids got today. All the science kits have been dumbed down for safety reasons, I'd be hacking together computers and software. Which I do now.
The Heathkit oscilloscopes were of very good quality. These days you can spend a fortune on a digital scope, but many of them are only good for digital signals, and many don't go over a few Mhz.
Does anyone (besides me, obviously) remember the Benton Harbor Lunch Box? That's an example of good, efficient design! Not too many parts, and it was adequate to the task.
Not only did I build quite a few of just about everything, I worked at the store in Omaha until I graduated from high school. What an education! Still have my H89/H77 combination. Booted it up a couple years ago. Still runs. Amazing!
A Heathkit Hero Kit.
A kit for converting Solar DC to the Community Power Grid AC.
A Heathkit Hero Kit.
A kit to plug in my electric car to charge up with.
A Heathkit Hero Kit.
A Heathkit Hero Kit.
My P.O. says that I haven't been all that bad this year.
Big disappointment recently when a young relative put together a crystal radio kit (from Maplin I think). When it didn't work I being the engineer in the family was called in to fix it. I took the scientific approach and calculated the centre to be bang in the middle of the medium wave band. After twiddling with it for some time and getting nothing I finally tried another portable radio with a medium wave band and was amazed to discover that not a single station was still broadcasting on it.
Is it to learn what it's like to work in an overseas sweatshop, stuffing components into a PCB? (But in the comfort of your home, and under no pressure?)
Stuffing requires no knowledge of electronics.
It takes less skill than, say, knitting (a much better hobby that all kit assemblers should seriously consider).
If you wanna do electronics, design something, build it and debug it.
If you want to order a kit similar to a Heathkit right now this evening, try TenTec http://www.tentec.com/ Their kits are mostly radio related and the manuals aren't quite up to what I remember from Heathkit, but they are pretty good.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
http://www.elecraft.com/ The performance of which blows away anything that Heathkit or TenTec ever made.
I still have the Heathkit Garage door opener in service.
It works great 30 years later, on a door.
It would be tough for them to have commercial success selling only kits for radios, tv, computers and 'as see on TV' gadgets like they're talking about. I'd like to see them take on the crap we're forced to buy at Lowes and Home Depot but that we really do have to get. Electric rechargable drills and leaf blowers and all similar equipment where you can solder your own cells and replace them in 5 years when they go bad! I wouldn't have people wind the coils but pressing in the bearings and soldering the trigger potentiometers and stuff sounds fine. Solder all the components for the chargers, etc. You would build a tool that you'd be proud to own and could fix the rest of your life-made in the U.S.A. by YOU. I remember going to the Heathkit store and seeing all kinds of stuff that we suffer to buy at Walmart and HH Gregg: Microwaves, stereo systems (with tubes!), robotic airplanes that feed your dog and collect their shit! Roomba type stuff! All that shit you can make in a kit and it would be twice as fun. If they're selling I'm buying and I certainly don't care if the parts come from Asia.
We had a Heathkit console color tv. We also had one of the first microwaves in our neighborhood and it was a heathkit. Dad was an engineer so he was always drawn to the DIY stuff. That microwave lasted 30+ years before we finally upgraded. One on/off button and a timer that would turn it off at 0. 3 small lights for on/open/overheat. Oh the days. Only time I've ever seen food catch fire in one (glazed donut for 60 seconds).
Create a fusion of Heathkit kits and the Minecraft game, devise ways to make it interesting for all ages, and watch 'crafters create project kits online. If Heathkit could actually create kits on demand to allow the makers to build their simulated kit in real life that would be awesome!
Hey, Minecrafters are already building redstone ALUs and printers--this is just the next step.
http://www.tentec.com/?s=kits
FYI, I have no relationship with the company, not even as a customer...
Will this be a true return with quality kits that actually required you do do something and 1/2 way understand what you were doing? Or more like the later cheapy 'insert chip into this socket here beacuse we told you so' type of kits? ( or worse.. insert card here and pretend you built something.. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If Heathkit made some nice Arduino projects, or some projects using the atmega25, then they wouldn't have to bother trying to sell them, the only problem would be trying to keep them in stock, and not angering suppliers by repeated queries about when the next shipment will occur. Besides /. and 2600, I also visit sites like hack-a-day (ok, yes, lkml too). I did recently install my home-built Gray-Hoverman superantenna for digital tv reception --and it works better than expected, and I was expecting a lot--. There are 7 stations broadcasting locally, shared between 4 towers. I actually have 3 GH antennas pointing in different directions ganged together, then that combined signal is split 3 ways to 3 different TVs. 4 of the 7 have signal strengths of (at least) 100%. One has a signal strength of at least 66%, and one has a signal strength of 50%. I never get MPEG pixellation. The floor level on most of the TVs is between 3 and 4 bars (out of 18). Even in the rain I still get signal (and I couldn't say that with satellite, its a digital signal with forward error correction too, and a heavy rainstorm would kill the satellite downlink). Not so here. Yes its geeky, but I'm the kind to do a Heathkit kit.
My dad built a Heathkit combined hi-fi amplifier/FM receiver when I was about 9 or 10. I got interested and he let me learn soldering using the soldering practice board that came with the kit (he could solder already). That went OK, so next birthday I got a small portable AM radio kit, Heathkit again. I never got it to work - the small audio power stage was very touchy, and used germanium transistors, so it was extremely easy to blow the transistors when setting it up. Nevertheless I did get interested in electronics despite this setback, and moving on via a Sinclair X-40 kit instruction manual I was given (never could afford the actual kit!), I eventually built stuff successfully from magazines such as Practical Electronics, ETI and Elektor. At 16 I left school and went to work for an electronics company in a R&D capacity - they gave me the job solely on my practical experience with electronics I'd learned as a hobby, not from school results. That company had a similar ethos to Heathkit - extremely high quality components and PCBs, ultra-neat wiring, every transistor sitting on its own "transipad". I felt right at home - I thought that was how all electronics stuff was put together. Opening up consumer stuff built in Japan to fix it for friends was a shock just how shoddily that stuff was thrown together. On one occasion we were trying desperately to solve the problem of microphony on a frequency synthesiser (any vibration of the PCB or unit would modulate the carrier). I discovered (taking my cue from Jap crap) that dumping candle wax over the sensitive oscillator components did the job very effectively, but my boss absolutely refused to allow it as a solution - apart from perhaps being hard to productionise, it just went against the grain of ultra-neatness that the company insisted on. Needless to say they have been history now for a very long time. Rather sad that such ultra-high build quality is a thing of the past - though perhaps in this day of surface mount it's less of an issue than it used to be.
For the real thing. You cant replace the feel and knowledge that real hardware that you have sweated over and burnt your fingers building.
And if you can tell me 'its the same difference' sitting down at a modern PC running an emulator and actually holding the real thing in your hands.. you are either lying or a sad excuse for a techie.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For those musically inclined DIY slashdotters, PAIA has been around for ever. Theremins, tube preamps, effects pedals, analog synths, they could keep you busy for years! They have all sorts of neat kits.
http://paia.com/
Gah! Would it really be so hard for Slashdot to convert line breaks into paragraphs? And My title had a '-->' between the two words. Expecting us to write raw HTML is stupid, even if we are geeks.
The garage parking assistant consists of a tennis ball, a string, and a booklet of warnings about how hanging it should only be done by a skilled professional and to not depend on it as your sole method of parking your car, and you should keep your eyes open at all times while parking, etc.
I went to http://www.newhamstore.com/ and bought some antennas. They are a great company to deal with.
Great to see this coming back - something that my kids can play with and learn from.
Now just bring back Capsela and I will be complete.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
You know what I want to see from Heathkit? A wideband-FM component video modulator (and companion demodulator) for cheap whole-house HD video distribution. Instead of screwing around with HDCP, or getting tangled up with Hollywood, DRM, and $200 worth of DSP hardware to try and transform 720p60 and 1080i60 into realtime MPEG-2/4, just leave them as analog signals. Take the "Y"(luminance) baseband signal, and modulate it onto a wideband FM carrier somewhere around 200MHz. Then do the same with the "Pb" and "Pr" signals, on wideband FM carriers of their own. Then take the analog stereo input, and run it through a commodity FM stereo modulator chip at something like 88MHz. Feed the signal into a dedicated 75-ohm cable (like the slightly ratty coax buried inside the walls that was put there when the house got built during the 70s or 80s, and hasn't been used since the 90s because it's only RG-59 and falls off rapidly above 500MHz), and use an equally cheap tuner box at each TV throughout the house to tune the modulated wideband FM Y, Pb, and Pr signals back down to component video, tune the FM stereo signal and output analog left and right, and connect it to the TV of interest.
I'm guessing that a kit project for something like this could profitably sell for around $50 for the transmitter (about $20 worth of parts), and around $40-50 per demodulator box. Not trivially cheap, but if you've ever seen the price of anything intended for transmission of whole-house HD video via HDMI... well, something like this is utterly dirt cheap by comparison.
It blows my mind that nobody has ever seriously considered making something like this (unless, of course, there's something unusually hard about throwing a ~50MHz baseband signal onto a wideband FM carrier that I'm not aware of). Everybody thinks transmission of uncompressed analog HD video is impossible just because it would take too much bandwidth to do for BROADCAST video. In this case, it's closed circuit, using a dedicated coax cable that's currently buried in the walls doing nothing besides oxidize. It doesn't *matter* if it takes as much bandwidth as the entire broadcast UHF band to send a single channel, because that's all that NEEDS to fit through that one cable.
There are plenty of expensive ways to distribute HD video to other TVs in the house. There are a few decent ways to do it via cat5 if you can pull new cable. There's basically no way at all to do it cheaply (as HD video) if the only cable that's conveniently at your disposal is an old, abandoned 75-ohm RG59 coax buried inside the walls.
Awesome. I still have my Heathkit Vacuum Tube Voltmeter. I need to dig it out and see if it still works ...
I believe you will find that AutoCAD 1 ran on the Z-DOS (MS-DOS) side of the Z-100 series computers, not on the 8-bit H/Z-89 or H/Z-90's which had Zilog Z-80 processors. The Z-100 had 640x225 bitmap graphics in monochrome or 8 colors. The 8-bit systems had only VT-52 / VT-100 character block graphics. There are pictures of each on my website here.
parts may be cheap, but there's a lot more to a kit (esp a Heathkit) than a bag o'parts.
Someone has to design the widget in the first place, and what you're proposing is probably a 6-12 workmonth effort to come up with a kit-buildable design, do the prototypes, pass the FCC certification tests, etc.
Then, someone has to write the assembly manual, develop the kitting, etc.
So, by the time you're done, the $20-30 worth of piece parts is going to be a $200-300 box. As others have pointed out, these days, assembly labor is a tiny fraction of the product cost: you still need all the engineering and design up front, and you have add the substantially greater documentation and support costs.
Especially so for kits: the volume is small. I've talked to people selling kits into technically sophisticated markets (amateur satellite, etc.), and if you sell 100 kits in a year, you're doing pretty well. If it took only a year of fully burdened engineer time, then the engineering time on the first 5 years production is $500 per unit.
From the Heathkit web site....
"Heathkit
You The kit Builders have Spoken!
Thank you for your overwhelming response to our announcement that Heathkit is back into the Do-it-Yourself kits business. We received many great suggestions for kits you would like to build.
We will be releasing Garage Parking Assistant kit (GPA-100) in late September and soon after the Wireless Swimming Pool Monitor kit will be available.
Based on your input, we are looking at developing amateur radio kits. Our goal is to have kits available by the end of year.
Please keep your suggestions coming so that we can continue to bring you interesting, unique Heathkit products."
We used to call them "GriefKits" because they so frequently required LOTS of troubleshooting. Of course, my construction skills in those days were not as good as they got later. And after a 20 year hiatus, now my eyesight isn't what it used to be, so they'll be GriefKits all over again...
I've got a Heathkit electric organ that my dad put together years ago - still works great! I had to replace some of the frequency dividers a few years back, which was actually possible thanks to the wonderful wiring and timing diagrams, and gave me a chance to put my EE degree to some use.
I was sadden by Heathkit closing its doors just as I was able to have some "excess" capital for such things. However, Elecraft kits are demonstrably superior in every possible way. I have built a number of their kits, as I was having severe lead withdrawal symptoms;^)
I am not a spokesman for Elecraft, but if you haven't tried one of their amateur radio kits, you should!