It’s likely that many Hackaday readers will have had their interest in electronics as a child honed by exposure to an electronics kit. The type of toy that featured a console covered in electronic components with spring terminals, and on which a variety of projects could be built by wiring up circuits. [Matthew North Music] has a couple of these, and he’s made a video investigating whether they can be used to make music.
The kits he’s found are a Radio Shack one from we’re guessing the 1970s, and a “Cambridge University Recording Studio” kit that looks to be 1990s-vintage. The former is all discrete components and passive, while the latter sports that digital audio record/playback chip that was the thing to have in a novelty item three decades ago. With them both he can create a variety of oscillator and filter circuits, though for the video he settles for a fairly simple tone whose pitch is controlled by an light-dependent resistor, and a metronome as a drum beat.
The result is a little avant garde, but certainly shows promise. The beauty of these kits is they can now be had for a song, and as grown-ups we don’t have to follow the rules set out in the book, so we can see there’s a lot of fun to be had. We look forward to some brave soul using them in a life performance at a hacker camp.
You can see where Moog Grandmother got it’s inspiration :)
Those kits and the book of circuits that accompany them are a great way to brush up on your fundamentals. We all need a reminder of the basics from time to time. This project is a wonderful creative use of a classic educational toy. Well done.
Kraftwerk!
Woooow, I think I had the ’75 in One’ kit when I was a kid. I would have been 14-15 in 1980, so I would have most likely gotten it as a gift sometime in the late 70’s. I remember messing with that thing for hours. It went over better than the chemistry set. I’ll have to watch the video later.
I had one in the early ’80s. Got it as a Christmas present and had the crystal radio project from the book working before we sat down to lunch. I had other kits over the years, some with spring terminals and some with breadboards, but I do remember this one as being particularly good for whiling away an afternoon with experimenting.
I found a little breadboard kit with a handful of projects a couple of years ago, and my granddaughters spent some time this summer making things with it. These things really are great for sparking interest.
I had the 1990’s version of the Radio Shack 75-in-one kit, and I spent so many hours building and rebuilding all the circuits in the book (and then trying to make up my own). It’s remarkable how little it changed from that ’70s version, but I guess that’s part of why Radio Shack ended up going out of business.
Me, too! And it sounds like we’re the same age. I’m pretty sure that’s the exact kit I had. I was really interested in chemistry, too, though, because my dad was a chemist.
I watched the video. I found it in a 1979 Radio Shack Catalog ($22.95) at https://radioshackcatalogs.com It came in a wooden base (like I remember) unlike the one the guy had in the video. The 150-in-1 was $29.95.
“The beauty of these kits is they can now be had for a song,”
Someone on the local Craigslist wants $150 for 150-in-1 kit!
(But, I think it is “New in Box”)
I do have several various ones that have been picked up cheap over the years.
I had a 130-in-one and while I enjoyed building the various circuits and seeing them work, for whatever reason I never quite grasped how things worked.
Later I bought myself what I assume is a more recent version of that recording studio. It had a different name and the color scheme and art were different. I somehow lost the book very shortly after buying it, and despite my efforts, I was never able to find a datasheet online for the chip. I’m not sure I ever got to use the thing. It never occurred to me to go talk to Norm down at Radio Shack and see if I could order another book for it. (You were on a first name basis with the manager of your local RS too, right?)
I wish I had kept them, or at least the 130-in-one. Lots of good memories there. Though it was starting to show it’s age, being made of cardboard and having spent quite some years at the hands of a kid. The potentiometer fell apart too, it wasn’t just that the knob came off, but the whole shaft came out of it somehow. Still, it was a piece of my childhood and a link to my hobbies today.
yeah i look back at it as a missed opportunity
the only one that made an impact on me was called like ‘sunrise sunset’, it was an led that would turn on and off slowly so that it looked like it was fading. i liked it so well that i changed the resistor capacitor values to make it go slower. i still waited years to learn such lofty concepts as ohms law but it was my first exposure to \tau = R * C i guess
i stared at the cover photo for a good long while and erupted into the comments section, saying:
so an electronics kit is just a breadboard with a parts pile and i have both of those in wild abundance and i’ve still only built single-digit numbers of oscillators out of discrete components wow
My xxx-in-ones never survived. I scavenged parts from them and the cardboard stuff just fell apart. I did build a lot of them but really started to understand electronics when I had a copy of the Philips EE2000 series build kits manual where it was really well explained for a 10 year old. I got a breadboard and a stack of jumper wires (self cut and stripped) and some extra parts and got to building stuff off schematics when I learned the symbols, resistor colour codes etc. And a 9V rechargeable battery and those clips that always failed lol!
yeah. I was gifted the 50-in-1 set in the early 70s and learned a ton from it. Radios and amplifiers were my favourite. The kit was gradually pillaged for parts in later years… I think i still have the mA meter around somewhere.
Later i bought a 300-in-1 when it was on sale. Fewer of those spring connectors, and a nice protoboard in the middle. This has been hacked into a bit of a test bench.
First time I’ve seen that Cambridge “digital recording studio” thing. Anyone have a link to a manual for that? Looks coool…
https://apaltech.com/files/data/rts0073/0073.pdf
“Forbidden Planet” soundtrack.
Had 3 of them from Radio Shack as a kid. The best part was the 100 mw FM Transmitter that spattered all over the Frequency’s Raising Hell with the TV’s across the nabourhood…