[Anthony Francis-Jones], like us, has a soft spot for the educational electronic kits from days gone by. In a recent video you can see below, he shows the insides of a Philips EE08 two-transistor radio kit. This is the same kit he built a few months ago (see the second video, below).
Electronics sure look different these days. No surface mount here or even printed circuit boards. The kit had paper cards to guide the construction since the kit could be made into different circuits.
![[Anthony] holding the EE8 kit](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/EE8-banner.jpg?w=600&h=450)
Back in 1966, a suitable toy for a geeky kid was a radio kit. You could find simple crystal radio sets or some more advanced ones. But some lucky kids got the Philips Electronic Engineer EE8 Kit on Christmas morning. [Anthony Francis-Jones] shows us how to build a 2-transistor AM radio from a Philips Electronic Engineer EE8 Kit.
According to [The Radar Room], the kit wasn’t just an AM radio. It had multiple circuits to make (one at a time, of course), ranging from a code oscillator to a “wetness detector.”
The kit came with a breadboard and some overlays for the various circuits, along with the required components. It relied on springs, friction, and gravity to hold most of the components to the breadboard. A little wire is used, but mostly the components are connected to each other with their leads and spring terminals.
