Comment by csmuk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csmuk | Hacker News Reader

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When I was a kid we had kits for entire computers, radios, modems, test gear and stuff.

What happened to that?

Not impressed with flashing LEDs on string.

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Edit: Add a rant as people seem to miss my point:

Well all the kit companies disappeared as people learned to assemble prefab stuff and purchase ready made consumer electronics made by the lowest bidder.

I'll probably get downvoted for this but...

My real problem is that people want a quick fix now rather than actually learning something or constructing something of complexity. About all you get now is someone plugging an LED into a prefab arduino and crudely hacking together some prefab C functions and it's the next best thing since sliced bread, requires a whole blog about it and much circle-jerking from the maker crowd about how this is the next greatest flashing LED contraption.

Put a 555 or a couple of transistors, capacitors, resistors on the table for a simple astable multivibrator and bricks will be shit. Even the basic maths for working out which resistor has to be used in series with an LED to limit current has to be canned in an iPhone app these days.

This is a cult of people assembling Ikea furniture, no more.

Hey, there is a project going on that is much like you'd like. I took my 12 year old through it, and it's a bit rough, but not bad for how cheap it is:

http://www.pyroelectro.com/edu/digital/

That's closer to it although a little sparse by the looks. Possibly a very short introductory course.

If asked, I tend to direct people towards the following books:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Electronics-Student-Manual/dp/...

Note: you need both the student manual (which most people don't know exists) and The Art Of Electronics.

To cover the maths background required, I recommend:

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Birth-Numbers-Jan-Gullberg...

They are not cheap but worth it.

Oh and a calculator. Any old cheap scientific (Casio/TI/HP) will do as long as it doesn't make errors.

The big problem for me was the maths initially. It doesn't take long before you hit a brick wall at the age of 12. My 10 year old daughter is learning algebra and programming (in python!) though at school so things are looking up.

Yeah, sort of agree. I found myself wondering, whats wrong with ye olde bread board? And then, like you say, kits, which we can easily still buy.

But lower down I saw their ideas about using this kit on paper or material, and what not. Which does seem more like craft materials than education, but also educational. So, I'd suggest this kit is a way in. It can get people, kids, interested, and once "hooked" they can then get all bread board about it, then wield a soldering iron in anger.

So, really it depends on how this stuff is used. Any one using this as an education tool would need to sort of spot the talent, and quickly move them on to something a little more educationally useful.

"Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you’re always going to get a pop culture" - Alan Kay

and yes, the resulting S/N ratio is an extremely tough pill to swallow.

Great quote. Sums it up just right.

What is important to note in these kind of scenarios is that in most cases the "signal level" does not decrease. So the increase of "noise" is not that bad of a thing, it is usually quite trivial to filter out, and there is always something/someone useful popping out from the noise too.

In general I detest the kind of attitude you represented in your parent comment, eg people shouldn't doing something they enjoy just because it doesn't meet your standards.

Actually that's a pretty large misinterpretation of what I said. Conclusively:

People should still do this, but stop turning it into a cultural movement in which everything unremarkable is remarkable and knowledge is abstracted away into insignificance. The knowledge is infinitely more important than the abstraction as the abstractions come and go.

For an extreme example: When playing around with electricity that knowledge and those fundamentals can and do make the difference between life and death. Some maker contraptions that I've seen that flash lights connected to the mains are so dangerous it's unreal.

Thank you for making me feel less curmudgeonly!

I've thought the same thing for the longest while. I love that people of all ages are starting to learn about electronics & firmware. At the same time, the desire to build something sophisticated has people skipping large steps and as a result, build insanely complicated systems that a little knowledge would let them do in a much simpler fashion.

They're learning, but with enormous gaps in knowledge.

Tons of kits like this still exist now a days if you are into guitar playing. kits to build copies of long defunct pedals, or old school tube amps. a lot of fun to make your pedal board, and you can learn as much or as little as you want.

As a kit I cut my teeth on building a hero 1 robot from heathkit before I even learned to write cursive. I often tell people that just to up my geek cred. Luckily the drive to do nerdy things has never really left me.

I think you're looking for Tindie https://www.tindie.com/

No I'm not. I see on there instantly:

Expensive, poorly designed decade resistance boxes that use pissy little SMT resistors that will catch fire if you have an accident rather than get a little warm: https://www.tindie.com/products/Atlanta_Robotics/decade-resi...

What the fuck? Multimeter anyone? https://www.tindie.com/products/Steves_Hobby_Store/the-stopl...

Flashing crap, most of it no better than $2 chinese plastic junk: https://www.tindie.com/products/category/wearables/

This is precisely what I don't want to see and I wish people would stop worshipping.

Really? I see:

A DIY weather station kit that feeds its data to the Raspberry Pi: https://www.tindie.com/products/tmhrtly/airpi-kit/

DIY Amplifiers: https://www.tindie.com/products/diyourfaceoff/fully-assemble...

A DIY 8x8 LED games console: https://www.tindie.com/products/hotchk155/sixtyfourpixels-lo...

DIY musical instruments: https://www.tindie.com/products/hotchk155/le-strum-hack-it-y...

TTL Tennis for Two: https://www.tindie.com/products/wmbuchholz/ttl-tennis-for-tw...

I'll give you the last item, but the rest are junk. Sorry.

I would rather, for music, use http://www.paia.com/ or http://www.doepfer.de/ for example.

Doepfer are well outside the price range of experimenters.

Some of their analogue kits are eye-wateringly expensive for what they are.

Hard as it may be to believe, there's a difference between things that don't interest you personally and things that are junk. And the existence of things that don't interest you somewhere does not automatically mean that everything there is crap.

Don't see the sort of kits you like being made? Join us! Innovate, and design your own!

Do you think that somebody took all that stuff and buried it all underground?

Go buy it if you want it.

Kit business has wound down significantly from its heydays. Eg Heath stopped producing its famous Heathkits in the early nineties.

No, its grown, quite a bit, and only heathkit has gone away.

There's much better stuff out there than when I was a kid and all we had was heathkit. However you need to use the internet, not just the annual heathkit catalog.

Something along the lines of the pie used to have basically one very big slice, which went out of business in '92, and since then the pie has expanded quite a bit, although no individual slice has come close to the size of Heathkit before it sank... the small size is probably why the individual companies are growing instead of shrinking LOL.

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