Lectron System, the Arduino Precursor | Hacker News Reader

Lectron System, the Arduino Precursor

lectron.info

36 pointsgiulianopz11 comments

As the co-founder of Arduino I can confirm this was a great inspiration for me. I learned electronics with this kit when I was 7 and it gave me also a great appreciation for design as well. The way I taught electronics to designers was also inspired by the method used in the book that came with the kit. I still have the book from my original kit. It’s an amazing tool

[OT] Great to see Massimo hanging out in Hacker News :)

Thank you!

'precursor' is a bit of a stretch, as in the sixties MCUs weren't conceived yet. It's rather a fancy version of a solderless breadboard. It's been a long time since I've seen them and I never had one. I started with the competition, a Philips Electronic Baukasten.

I had a toy as a kid that was somewhere between this Lectron system and the 75 in 1 Electronics kits that Radio Shack sold.

Components were on square blocks each (red plastic). Small clips would hold blocks edge to edge. Wiring was by means of, like the "75 in 1", spring terminals in the corners of the blocks — a small steel clip was inserted into the spring terminal — just the right length to bridge the gap between adjacent blocks.

Simple stuff as I recall: battery, light bulb, switch. If there was a transistor or two it went over my head at so young an age. I was at the "hook up battery to a bulb" stage of electronics learning.

Submitter broke the rules a bit here, the HN headline should match the article/site title which is, "The Universe of the Lectron System."

Moreover, I feel like Arduino is the wrong comparison. I guess submitter meant "breadboard" circuits. (Where Arduino is often used, but these were popular decades before the Arduino came to town.)

I have a Lectron carburettor on my KTM dirt motorcycle. I knew it was advanced, but this is on another level!

Looks very similar to denshi blocks, surprised I've heard of them but not this.

More a precursor to things like them and LittleBits than Arduino

Edit: were these only released in German? I guess that'd explain it. Can't find any English language sets for sale

I came across a similar concept in the shape of a kid toy in the early 90s. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the game (my parents got it on a trip to France), but it definitely got me hooked.

Snap Circuits were popular at that time.

I don't remember snap circuits when I was a kid, it was all about the spring terminal kits.

I didn't really get anywhere with any of it until I started doing microcontrollers though. I don't think I really made an effort to really learn and improve in the analog era, I followed along with instructions but never did anything nontrivial on my own

Occasionally things just didn't work, pretty sure broken components or bad connections or some other dumb trivial problem was happening, so I kind of got a sense that these analog parts were mysterious unknowable things.

I think I would have probably learned more if I'd had the Falstad simulator or something.

With microcontrollers, the path forward is much clearer, once you know the basics of coding and how to use libraries, whatever idea you have seems possible, and it's more obvious what the next step is and what you should be learning.

With analog work it's all like doing math, everything interacts in ten different ways, and the application itself is one side of an equation you sometimes have to change to make it all work.

Growing up watching tech in the movies, you almost never see anything that's possible without microcontrollers. You have to be really smart to even come up with any ideas that you can do with analog.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com