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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 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.
And sometimes dangerous voltages too. I put together a Heathkit oscilloscope without any problem, it just took a while. The only problem was that the designers had chosen some transistors with marginal specifications for the high voltage supply (only about 3KV) and the transistors kept failing even though everything was adjusted to the specifications by the Heathkit service center itself!
They should issue a do it yourself laser-based fusion reactor kit! Plenty of danger in all areas!
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.
...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.
I got the opportunity to buy one back in the 80's, and couldn't pass it up. But I hate to disappoint you, it was just a linear power supply and a Q-bus backplane kit. The PDP-11/03 board, memory card, and serial interface were all straight from the DEC plant.
That said... It ate TRS-80 model 1's for breakfast! :)
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.
Check out any number of hackerspaces across the United States - electronics is not just for the over 50 crowd. Examples:
Noisebridge
LVL1
NY Resist (sp??)
I belong to LVL1 in Louisville, Kentucky and we have several high school age kids (boys and girls) who are very active in our group.
Are there any Americans left who can soldier...
Yes, quite a few actually. For the last decade we've been exporting them to the Middle East.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Don't worry: They can just update to the "Heathkit: 21st century skills" collection, where you learn the art and science of hiring Chinese subcontractors to assemble the kit, and the CAD skills necessary to design a case with your branding and logo to contain the finished product.
I was too young for these when they went out of business, but now I want some!
I was old enough to want them before they stopped making them, but too young to be able to afford them. Now that I have disposable income, look out, shelves! Prepare to be filled with half-finished projects.
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.
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.
So you learn the basicis of hardware troubleshooting with actual components - that's a good basic engineering skill. You also learn that Violet Gives Willingly.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.