At this year's Finger's I got a nice little pile of Kosmos parts. That stuff is ultra nostalgic to me
❤2
I grew up on those kits. I still like to use their system occasionally, just because it gives me all the happy feelings
These days, electronics sets for kids and (young) adults have of course all but died out. I guess the market just isn't there anymore with the attention span of so many children being thoroughly fucked by all the different forms of media crashing in on them all the time. I sound like a boomer, but it saddens me to the depth of my heart. And this will come and haunt us as a society.
💯4😭3
Another system was the one produced by Philips / Schuco. I had one as a child and I hated it. It was such a pain to remove those springs and insert anything into them. It came with a plastic tool to assist with this, but that barely worked. And I also remember it not being much fun. A schematic, a few words, but not much on how things actually work.
This FM radio module for example. Every electronics kit had to have a few radio experiments. They often were the highlight of the whole thing. Philips' take on it was to use this TDA 7000. It integrates everything for a superhet, the input stage, the mixer, the LO, IF, demodulator. All you need is a few additional components and an audio amplifier to make it sing. Almost guaranteed, low frustration risk, instant gratification. But boring.
Philips / Schuco had a whole stack of sets and supplemental sets. FM radio, fiber optics, digital electronics, feedback control systems...