{"id":16,"date":"2008-08-13T20:57:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-13T20:57:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2016-09-24T16:44:21","modified_gmt":"2016-09-24T16:44:21","slug":"50-in-1-electronic-kits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lns.com\/?p=16","title":{"rendered":"50-in-1 Electronic Kits…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once upon a time, back in the days of “stone knives and bearskins<\/a>“, Radio Shack made a series of kits for the budding electronic engineer known as 50-in-1 kits. (You could get bigger sets that promised up to 200 different things you could make.) The kit would be a box with a nice wood frame and a cardboard top that had bunch of different electronic components on it like resistors, capacitors, diodes and one or two transistors. Each of the components would be tied to a little spring that you would bend back to insert hook-up wire into. No soldering and it was a breeze to take apart. The kit would start off with something simple showing how circuits are made using a switch, a light bulb and a battery. It would end up showing you how to make a tunable AM radio or oscillator.<\/p>\n

I had one of these kits when I was a kid. My sister and I split the cost of buying one and I ended up monopolizing the use of it. It was at this point when I was a kid, I knew I was going into some line of electronics. I loved following the directions and learning the art and also trying to design my own buy taking there design and “bending” it so the oscillator would run a little faster or slower or pick up a different spectrum of radio to listen to.<\/p>\n

Radio Shack has long since stooped producing these kits. I think Radio Shack is missing an opportunity here as they are very visibly sponsoring things like the Maker Faire<\/a> and other MAKE Magazine<\/a> Projects efforts. So where Radio Shack, dropped the ball on this a company called Elenco<\/a> has put out a similar 50-in-1 kit. Amazon sells them<\/a> for less than $25 each. Cheap! Having a 9 year old son that has a technical bent, meant we had to have one. It was a great time bonding with him on how to build a simple circuit and creating something more complex like an AM radio. It is well worth the $20 investment. (Actually, I have to credit David Diaz<\/a> for buying it for my son at Fry’s.)<\/p>\n

Elenco has a number of pretty cool electronics kits that you can buy and put together with your kids. Their model “FUN-875”<\/a> is a radio controlled race car that took my son and I a couple of evenings to put together. Once we did, we had a pretty nice little car that ends up being pretty sturdy too.<\/p>\n

So, three cheers to Elenco for making electronics a little more accessible to kids again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once upon a time, back in the days of “stone knives and bearskins“, Radio Shack made a series of kits for the budding electronic engineer known as 50-in-1 kits. (You could get bigger sets that promised up to 200 different things you could make.) The kit would be a box with a nice wood frame … Continue reading “50-in-1 Electronic Kits…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lns.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lns.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lns.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lns.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lns.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lns.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lns.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions\/97"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lns.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lns.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lns.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}