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Thread: Kids and clubs

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    Senior Member BCNZ's Avatar
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    Default Kids and clubs

    Another post I was reading here got me to thinking about the club I used to belong to as a kid.

    When I was about 10, I found an electronics club which was "attached" to the local Ham radio club - an informal evening run on a Friday night in which kids could learn about electronics and get hands on experience with components, building circuits, learning to use basic test equipment etc.

    Do these kinds of evenings/clubs exist today? Apart from books, how do kids of the 21st century learn about the subject?

    Are kids even interested in electronics these days?



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    Electronics has become just a synonym for mobile phones, MP3 players and diverse short lived video and gaming devices.

    The way I see it, hands on electronics is a dying trade even in the amateur sector.
    Look at a Dick Smith store today

    My 10y/o is the only kid in his school who shows some interest in actual electronics(guess why ).

    But it is all computers these days... and some 10y/o s can be real whizz kids there.

    Electronics is designed on a computer, printed out on a bit of silicon, mass produced with a robot, then fitted in an enclosure, tested and packed by some chicks somewhere in Asia.
    It is therefore ultra cheap and not worth the effort of building yourself.

    When I was about 13y/o, I built a 2x6(real mean Watts) amplifier and some rather large enclosures for speaker chassis from a surplus store and successfully powered the school disco with my compact cassette recorder connected to it.
    It made the school standard Dual turntable with inbuilt 2x6W speaker system sound like a teletubby telephone, for a quarter of the cost.

    Today you can get a 200(phoney Watt) 5.1 sound system for $200 that even sounds reasonable. So what is the point of DIY?

    Same with music electronics. I built guitar amps, even synthesisers, multivoice organs... totally nuts. Today you just download a software version of a Hammond B3 on your computer and it sounds better than Deep Purple and weighs 100kg less.
    40ch UHF transceivers(walkie talkies) with several kms range for $39.95... do I have to blubber on?

    I am a die hard and you will have to pry my Weller out of my cold dead fingers but today's generation have somehow moved on and see no point in visualising a single transistor.

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    Quote Originally Posted by nomeat View Post
    I am a die hard and you will have to pry my Weller out of my cold dead fingers but today's generation have somehow moved on and see no point in visualising a single transistor.
    love it nomeat, and spot on! ROFLMAO
    When I explained to the guy what avatar I wanted, that wasn't what I meant!

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    So what is the point of DIY?
    Making something that did not otherwise exist.
    A video inverter is one example of something I was unable to just go out and buy.

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    Senior Member BCNZ's Avatar
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    Some good points raised there nomeat...

    100% on the mark too. Today's society has become a plethora of cheap chinese electronics smothering the world in their weight.

    The first "circuit" I ever built was on a piece of PCB around 40mm˛ - 2 flashing LEDs as railway crossing lights. Astable multi-vibrator using two BC547s and some caps, resistors and diodes. I was shown how the circuit was laid out, taught how it worked, shown how to clean the copper on the board and draw the tracks by hand using a DALO pen. How to mix the ferric chloride, the design and construction of a home-made "agitating bath" and the production of the board.

    I still have that little circuit. Somehow it's managed to survive 30 years of shifting and chuck-outs. Whenever I came across it I'd always rescue it. I hope I don't ever lose it. Kinda has sentimental value.

    Kids these days don't know what valves are. They don't even know what a dial telephone is or how to use one. [Friend's daughter who is 14 saw one for the first time and was completely lost!]

    They don't know about this old technology.

    I recently had a big clean out and came across some old "Everyday Electronics" magazines that I bought as a kid in the 1970s. Projects such as eggtimers on veroboard and the "Chromachime" - a 24 tune doorbell using a LSI chip (which I built shortly after I got the magazine and had to import the IC from the UK!)

    So many of the projects in the magazines you just wouldn't bother making now. They come out of China in a tiny box with one small PCB holding a black blob of goo under which resides probably thousands of transistors.

    It seems like a means of learning lost to a generation tho.

    Oh, and the point of DIY?

    As well as making something you can't get (as Art mentioned) - it's a hobby, it's interesting, it gives a lot of self-satisfaction and can often produce some great results or give you a unit that costs far less than the commercial equivalent.
    Or, it has features that you just can't get on something that is store-bought.

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