Best Electronics Kits For Adults?

An anonymous reader writes "I'm an adult looking to learn how electronics work and have some fun building projects. But all the kits I've found online are for kids 8-10 years old, and they don't really explain the principles — they just color-code where to place components on boards. Are there any kits aimed at adults? I know if anyone has got the answer, it's this community."

Maybe a book?

[Anonymous Coward]

A good place to start might be to just browse the electronics/tech section at your bookstore. I think this has a better chance of explaining the fundamentals of circuit design. Maybe use this in conjunction with a kid designed for kids?

Kits

[sm62704]

It's been a long time since I built a Heathkit, do they still make them? My two favorites were my sixty watt guitar amplifier and my ham radio reciever; this was in the last '60s when I was a teenager.

But you're not really going to learn about electronics by building stuff from kits. Read books; when you have the theory then you can get the kits and will understand what's going on with them.

The library is your friend. It's often better than Google and Wikipedia combined.

comic book monthly science kit?

[peter303]

Decades ago when I was a kid I subscribed to a "science kit of the month" advertised on the back of comic books. They kind of built on top each other - one month an amplifier, then a telegraph, then a radio, etc. The subscription was like an outrageous $5 a month - about a third of my paper-route profits. My parents then used to complain about me stinking up the basement with the soldering gun. My guess is that someone declared this dangerous and it went off the market pretty much like chemistry kits have also been emasculated. Then I suppose if it was these days I'd be hacking computers then.

Make something you love

[bigHairyDog]

Learning electronics is easier with a project that means something to you. I'm into photography, so I learned by building a sound trigger for my camera for high speed photography.

You can get kits containing the components you need here: http://www.hiviz.com/ [hiviz.com]

And use them to make pictures like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bernieandjude/2578082432/ [flickr.com]

The kit comes with instructions and a circuit diagram. All else you need is a book like Starting Electronics by Keith Brindley to help you interpret the diagram.

You're an adult now, you don't need a kit.

[serviscope_minor]

Seriously. The kits have nice big, brightly coloured bits which are physically large and easy to handle. They are also relatively hard to break. You don't really need those featues. Instead, get a good beginners book, for instance by Forest M. Mimms III, a solderless breadbroad, and then buy the components mentioned in the book. You can then start assembling them on the breadboard.

For what it's worth, I'd duggest the following:

Several reels of 100 metal film resistors, 100OHm, 1K, 10K, 100K and 1M.

A bag of brestripped, tinned and finished wires of various lengths for breadboard prototyping.

A reel of single core wire (for when the premade ones won't quite stretch).

Several bags of capacitors (100p 1n 10n 100n ceramic, polyester, mica or mylar and 1u 100u and 1000u in electrolytic). You want maybe 20 of the smaller ones and 10 of the larger ones.

A nice big bag of cheap transistors. These are a little trickier, but all of the low priced ones will be similar. You probably want something like 20 small ones like BC108 (NPN, low power) a corresponding PNP one and 5 medium power ones like BFY51.

10 cheap LEDs

1 Buzzer

1 loudspeaker

A good powersupply. You won't need more than 1Amp, but you probably want 0--15V variable, and 2 outputs if you can manage it. This is the mist expensive part, but you could just get a 9V wall wart if this is a problem. Batteries get annoying quite fast.

This will set you up way better than a kit.

You can also add to it later. You can buy a rail of 741 op amps (indestructible, and still popular even though they're 20 years obsoloete) and 555 oscillator chips. Later still you can get some logic ICs.

Plase, slashdotters weigh in, because I've missed something here.

Learn to solder first!

[TheGreatOrangePeel]

To save yourself frustration and headaches later, DON'T START SOLDERLESS! Learn how to solder first! Flow solder down a long wire. Strip parts out of a circuit board and put them back in without damaging them, without burning the board and checking with a magnifying glass that you don't have any solder tips that cross over onto the neighboring point. Get comfortable removing whole chips using both solder wick and a solder-sucker. Learn the components of solder so you're not wondering why you're leaving "tan stuff" (resin) on the board. Cut several parallel 'wires' on a circuit board and then fix it with solder and a single strand of copper wire ... if you learn how to solder first you'll save yourself the frustration of knowing how to fix a problem but lacking the actual skill to do so.

I'd look around for kits aimed at high school students. My senior year of high school I took an electronics course where we had to put together a radio from a kit. The good thing about a radio is that there's a lot of cans that need tweaking and points that need to be seen on an oscilloscope to get everything properly calibrated. In fact, this is the kit [electronickits.com] I used (note that I'm not endorsing the seller. I just happened across the product is all).

I'd go ahead and pick up an electronics text book geared toward college students as well.

...and start memorizing that v=i*r starting now.

Re:comic book monthly science kit?

[DerekLyons]

My guess is that someone declared this dangerous and it went off the market pretty much like chemistry kits have also been emasculated.

Ah yes, why use a prosaic explanation ("they went belly up like many companies do") when a groundless rant can be substituted?

Re:Kits

[Anonymous Coward]

But you're not really going to learn about electronics by building stuff from kits

Maybe YOU didn't but I learned significantly more from actually working in a lab than I ever did from textbooks. Theory books are great and all but you could just as well be reading a linear algebra or signal theory book. Its just math. Doing lab work made it real for me. Simple things like sending a pulse down an open ended coax line and seeing the reflection on an oscilloscope really helped me grasp EM theory. But maybe I just prefer a more practical learning style.

I say have a goal in mind. Pick something you want to build (like an audio amp or blinking led) and use the internet to make it happen.

slippery slope

[vsyskine1]

This is slippery slope. I started to want principles in the 6th grade, majored in solid state physics and still can't explain how bypolar transistor works. One has to explain quantum mechanics first!

Analog Kits

[Sebastopol]

I noticed a lot of the replies focused on digital kits. But are there any good analog kits? Seems to me that's where the lost art is: downloading code to flash to fix a big is a world away from computing quiescent points by hand.

Try to repair stuff

[Stavr0]

Find a dead piece of equipment, try to repair it. I'm surprised at the success rate I'm having. Laserjet III, Philips DVD player, Toshiba PVR ,space heater, answering machine... all stuff I salvaged and brought back to life.

Google for the name of the equipment, if it's a frequent/known problem you'll find repair instructions. BTW almost half of the salvaged stuff was repaired by replacing leaky/bulgy capacitors.