Thrift Store Electronics
My fate as an electrical engineer was sealed at a young age. Sometime during my early childhood, when visiting the thrift store with my mom, I managed to find and convince my parents to buy a radio electronics experimenter's kit. It had about 30 different components with springs to hold bits of wire. I'm pretty sure the thrift store version was missing some of the wire jumpers, but my dad was nice enough to make some bits of wire for me to use. I couldn't find an exact picture, but it looked something like this:
The instruction manual used two approaches to building each experiment: one listing the 1-to-1 connections between the numbered springs, and one with a full schematic. I remember thinking how hard it was to understand the schematic of even the simplest circuits. Thus, I stuck to the crutch of the numbered connection lists.
At one point during the 3rd grade, I remember looking forward in my science textbook and discovering a section on electronics. It had experiments like potato batteries, simple logic using switches, etc. I asked my teacher if we would be reading that part of the book, and he replied, "Maybe, and we might even light up a lightbulb!" Having built amazing circuits such as a morse code transmitter, I was completely unimpressed, and I felt terrible for it. He was trying to get me excited and I was a cynical 3rd grader. I'm sorry, Mr. Wilfong!
Eventually I discovered that they made bigger ones. With more blinking lights! It became a common item to ask from Santa, and eventually I was able to upgrade to the 200-in-1 kit, which looked exactly like this:
See that row of six LEDs on the front? I'm sure I killed more than one of those by running current through them without a resistor. They'd shine so bright! The nicer kits came with a guarantee that the manufacturer would replace the common parts that got fried ... and I fried several of them.
Eventually my dad and I decided to get the Cadillac of experimenter kits, the 300-in-1, which we both tinkered with:
By then I was in high school, and eventually the internet and programming got the better of me, but those hardware-focused days made me love the basic idea of real-life electronics. I even finally learned how to read a schematic ... as a college sophomore. It's so obvious now!
The instruction manual used two approaches to building each experiment: one listing the 1-to-1 connections between the numbered springs, and one with a full schematic. I remember thinking how hard it was to understand the schematic of even the simplest circuits. Thus, I stuck to the crutch of the numbered connection lists.
At one point during the 3rd grade, I remember looking forward in my science textbook and discovering a section on electronics. It had experiments like potato batteries, simple logic using switches, etc. I asked my teacher if we would be reading that part of the book, and he replied, "Maybe, and we might even light up a lightbulb!" Having built amazing circuits such as a morse code transmitter, I was completely unimpressed, and I felt terrible for it. He was trying to get me excited and I was a cynical 3rd grader. I'm sorry, Mr. Wilfong!
Eventually I discovered that they made bigger ones. With more blinking lights! It became a common item to ask from Santa, and eventually I was able to upgrade to the 200-in-1 kit, which looked exactly like this:
See that row of six LEDs on the front? I'm sure I killed more than one of those by running current through them without a resistor. They'd shine so bright! The nicer kits came with a guarantee that the manufacturer would replace the common parts that got fried ... and I fried several of them.
Eventually my dad and I decided to get the Cadillac of experimenter kits, the 300-in-1, which we both tinkered with:
By then I was in high school, and eventually the internet and programming got the better of me, but those hardware-focused days made me love the basic idea of real-life electronics. I even finally learned how to read a schematic ... as a college sophomore. It's so obvious now!