.. and even these. A combo set consisting of a CRT centered set that could serve as a very crude oscilloscope, and a set containing TV modules. Extremely cool, and they go for silly money on ebay these days (700 and upwards). But ultimately boring.

Philips/Schuco vs Kosmos is like Playmobil vs Lego. Playmobil is nice, if your play style does not focus on constructing things, but more on story telling and social interaction. I never did that, I'm autistic. I take things apart and put them back together. I construct things, I design, I engineer. And when you sell electronics kits, don't you want to appeal to those kinds of minds?

Some coil I once built. It was pretty shit

I gotta rant a bit about package management on Linux. A problem you think would be solved by $current_year.
My lab setup runs on *buntu 24.04 because I'm a lazy butt and I don't want to spend time updating all my machines all the time. I got the KiCad 9 PPA, which pulls in its own version of ngspice.
There's also Qucs-S which I want to give a shot as an LTSpice replacement, and it's not in the vanilla package tree. Someone maintains a PPA for it. But it also pulls in a version of ngspice, which collides with the one by KiCAD. The fuck?
Who maintains a PPA with a fork of a package that your software depends on and doesn't change the default installation paths for those files?
Why is there no snap of KiCad or Qucs-S? The solutions are there, USE THEM.
Now I gotta compile Qucs-S from source and run it out of some folder like it's 1996.

At this point I might as well go back to Gentoo. There I could at least whip up an ebuild within minutes >.<

Also, what's up with the spice integration in KiCad anyways? It seems nice enough to not be just an afterthought, but where are the spice models? It doesn't ship with anything, not even the most generic jelly bean parts. Do they really expect me to dig up everything on my own? Never heard of "batteries included"? Maybe I missed some magic kicad-spice-models package. The closest I could find is this inofficial git
https://github.com/kicad-spice-library/KiCad-Spice-Library

This brings me to something I need to figure out:
I got a heterogeneous bunch of Linux boxes and a whole spectrum of weird and odd software. Stuff pulled from git, random tar ball sources, binaries, the odd .deb file, and a bunch of wine prefixes and python venvs. Maintaining that is a nightmare. Especially so across all my systems.

So far I have an ad-hoc mix of local installations and things on my central nas. But, as I said, it's a nightmare.
I need to streamline it. Maybe keep everything central on the nas, and use rsync to pull it onto my laptop for mobile use.
But that leaves me with the problem of differences in the host OS. Maybe I could make a chroot with a minimal debian or ubuntu I build against. My skin crawls at the thought of X11 or desktop integration.
Before you mention docker: No. I want no abstraction layer between me and the files.

I'll look into nix.

Alright, we are up and running! Finally. Only had to also compile ngspice.

I really need to streamline all my manually installed programs soon. For now, let's press on. I hope this blows LTSpice out of the water. Being a native Qt6 app is already a huge perk.

It's $current_year, WHY ON EARTH do you not implement a theming engine? It took KiCad ages to finally do it. Now I'm being teleported back to ye olden days with Qucs-S. No, this is even worse, because the only customizable elements are the background and grid. You cannot set the foreground color. The heck.

sighs

what

First crash of the day while dragging a part 👌

9 pin noval with pin 9 not connected. 12V heater voltage, so if it's a 6.3V tube, it must have two heaters that can be connected in series. That and the pinout already suggest a double triode like the ECC81, 82 or 83. The varicap and ten turn pot must be part of some form of tuned RF circuit. So maybe an oscillator or filter. The screw terminals look like they would house a big air wound coil with tap. The transformer lives at the anode side of the second triode, if it's a double triode tube. It's too clunky to pass through any RF, so that rules out it being an oscillator+buffer. Instead the second triode looks like an audio stage. That made me think audion style receiver.