hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1536.txt

Episode: 1536
Title: HPR1536: The 150-in-1 Electronic Project Kit
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1536/hpr1536.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 04:46:52

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I'm C. Prompt in North Carolina, and this is Hacker Public Radio.
One of the coolest memories I have of my childhood is going to the local electronic store with my parents.
I'll follow it there to get parts for a TV that might be broken down or a antenna because cable was not readily available at that time.
Or maybe he was getting some parts to cover his CB radio habit.
The store had all kinds of gadgets that intrigued me and looking back, it probably brought out some of the inner geek in me.
There were electronics that looked like something out of a sci-fi movie or maybe a Star Trek episode.
Things that lit up, beeped, the world.
We used to come out of the store, we had a bunch of items that I really can't remember what they were or what they were for.
Maybe something like a soldering iron or solder or something of like a bettolic and really recalled 100%.
When it came to these electronic parts, I was pretty young.
So I was limited on what I was allowed to actually do with them or even touch them when my parents were around.
And these items were not cheap, they were fresh on the market and so they were pretty expensive I would imagine.
However, one year when I was around maybe the age of 7 or 8 my parents bought me a gift for Christmas that I instantly fell in love with.
It was the Science Fair 150 in one electronic project kit.
The store that I'm referring to is obviously Radio Shack.
And now, Radio Shack has got the name of being kind of a cheap place by cheap electronics and has made fun of sometimes in movies.
But at that time, Radio Shack was magic to me.
A little history about Radio Shack and it was the company that was started in 1921, a couple of brothers, Theodore and Milton Dorchman.
And it was developed at first to provide equipment for ham radio.
So it started in Boston and it was originally a retail store with some mellow and her operation.
In the name, Radio Shack was chosen because it was made to describe a small wooden structure that held equipment for shipped radio.
So a Radio Shack.
In 1939, they issued their very first catalog.
And I remember these catalogs, obviously not in 1939, but I remember these catalogs where something nice will love to sit around and just look through at all the cool gadgets and just marvel over some of the possibilities that these things might bring.
In 1954, Radio Shack began selling their very own private label called Realist.
Radio Shack was actually sued over this name and so they quickly changed it from Realist to Realistic.
In the 1960s, Radio Shack started to have some financial troubles and they were actually bankrupt.
And that was until man by the name of Charles Tandy bought the company for $300,000.
Now Tandy Corporation was originally a family-owned leather goods company.
It was based out of Fort Worth, Texas and it started around 1919.
And May of 2000, Radio Shack Corporation was made the official name.
And during the era of the personal computer revolution, Tandy came out with their famous model, the TRS-80.
That was in 1977.
In the 1980s, the TRS-80 color computer, which code name Coco, came out.
Later on, Tandy adopted the IBM architecture and Tandy started to develop what was known as the Tandy 1000 and 2000.
So let's talk a little bit about the actual item, the 150-in-1 electronic kit.
The kit itself is a wooden box.
And inside the wooden box is a cardboard inlet.
And the inlet is sectioned off with different items such as relays, lamps, meters, input, transformer, output,
transformers, volume controls, speakers, there's a switch.
There's also a large section in the middle that are sectioned off for resistors, capacitors, diodes
of all the various values.
Beside of each one of these components are little springs.
And the idea is to take the wires that come with it of different links and make a circuit between each one of the components.
So if you pull back the spring and slide the wire into it and then cross it over to the meter or whatever,
then it will make a circuit and something will happen.
Something like the light will come on or the relay will click or a sound will come out the speaker.
The 150-in-1 electronic project kit came with this really nice manual.
And inside the manual there was obviously 150 projects.
Each one of them are a very degree of how involved the circuit might be.
And it had a picture diagram.
I had the picture of the kit with the wires going from one component to the next.
And there was also a wiring sequence underneath it.
And each one of the circuits or the components rather on the cardboard inlet were numbered.
And so the idea would be say on the first one here that says 87-39-33,
so you would take a wire and go from the number 87 and patch it over to the component where number 39 was.
And then go from 39 and cross that over to component number 33.
And it would also underneath the wiring sequence there is an electronic diagram that most people are more familiar with if you've seen an electronic diagram.
What's really nice is off to the side of each one of these projects is what this project is demonstrating.
And so we'll go through and say this one that I'm looking at right now says light oriented direction finder.
This project demonstrates how outer space probes can be guided to far distance places by star light received from a telescope.
So we have a project for a youngster that not only shows them how to build this kit or this electronic project
and show them what these components do and how they interact with each other,
but it also is going to tell them what this project might do in the real world.
Fascinating, lovely.
Here's another project that's interesting. It's called the Generation of Electrical Energy.
The description says the purpose of this project is to consider how electricity may be generated change from AC to DC and be indicated on a meter.
This uses what appears to be a very simple circuit and it is.
But the important basic electronic operations used are very profound virtually every electronic circuit in your house uses one or more of the concepts we are about to consider.
So this shows just that something that you can create within this little box is explaining how something within your house is working.
It's mind boggling to a young person.
Even from the beginning pages of the book that comes with this kit is very profound.
In the States, this science fair 150 in one electronic project kit may be your first experience with the very exciting field of electricity and electronics.
We hope it won't be your last.
As a matter of fact, we hope it stimulates your interest in electronics as a hobby and that it may eventually lead you into a job with this very fascinating subject.
And with that, it set the stage.
Hopefully for some youngster out there other than myself that didn't really go into the field of electronics but found this item just absolutely fascinating and loved every minute playing with it while you were a kid.
Just wish that now that there was other stuff like that that children were interested in other than sitting around playing Xbox all day or PlayStation.
Not to say obviously that everyone is like that when they're younger but it seems to be the norm these days.
There are a lot of projects still out there that RadioShot Stoodle offers some of our still snapped together kids that seemed a little bit flimsy to me when I first saw it.
But there is a Kickstarter conversation that was going on while back that I found and I will need to follow up to see if I can actually find one of these things.
It was built on the Arduino it looks like and it was learned for electronics and programming and build your own inventions.
I want to put a link to the show notes link in the show notes to this.
And hopefully we can figure out if it's still around or if it ever came to fruition.
It was called 30 Arduino projects for the Evil Genius and it looks fantastic.
So hopefully this did come alive and it's available.
So in the show notes I'll put a link to some of the catalogs that were archived from RadioShot Stoodle as well as some pictures of the 150 and 1 electronic project kit.
Hopefully now that we have the Raspberry Pi and things like the Arduino electronic project kits like this are going to be more plentiful and people will start to find them as interesting and compelling as I did.
So thank you for listening this far and if you haven't already or if you are considering please record an episode for Hacker Public Radio.
We'd always use the episodes and if you ever want to find out more about it please go to hackerpublicradio.org.
Thank you again for listening. Have a great day. Bye-bye.
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