Anybody have recommendations for electronic kits?

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I have just heard about electronic kits (Heathkits, through reading Steve Jobs biography; and then electronickits.com through a google search) and I was wondering if anybody out there has ever tried these kits?

If you have tried electronic kits, which did you prefer? What would you recommend for a 15 year old kid?

I thought one of these kits would make a fun and interesting Christmas present.

a company called Ramsey also makes kits-they make some cool kits-google search them.

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8465 looks like it has some great stuff, including some wearable electronics I've been drooling over for some time now.

Is heathkit still around? googling now...oh, wow. they are, but now they're riding on their laurels and going as educational aids. They used to be very practical objects, like home stereo systems.

canakit makes some nice simple ones that yield good results, actual things that you can use... I'd recommend a radio transmitter, so the kid can hook up a radio broadcast to their computer stereo or whatever and listen to it anywhere in the house. If they have an Ipod or anything, they can hook up the transmitter to it and play the same music out of several stereos at one. Get a projector and you've got your own drive-in theater. Or bike-in, for 15 yr olds. :p

http://www.canakit.com/fm-transmitter-for-beginners-kit-ck017-uk017.html

^ They have tons of projects. This is a very simple one.

I've made a lot of various kits, mostly for pro-studio audio recording, but the canakits are very straightforward and have great instructions, and are rather easy on the wallet.

Made sure the kid gets a nice soldering iron, though. Having a bad iron will kill the interest like nothing else. Something with a fine tip, and if you can afford it, a temperature control is ideal. Radio Shack makes a digital soldering station that is the cheapest temp controlled iron that I know of ($60 us), and they're surprisingly reliable.

What else...eutectic solder (63/37) gives better joins, and is cheaper (less tin in the formula,) and a stainless steel scrubby shoved in a coffee cup to clean the tip is the best money ($1) you can spend on making your connections good. Just jab the tip of your iron in the cup before soldering each connection, and it polishes the tip right up. Makes faster joins.

Oh, that sparkfun lily pad link, I do not think that would be good for a beginner. Surface-mount components are much harder to work with than the big, discrete, hole-mount components.

oh my gosh -- you guys are the BEST!! !

I had looked into canakits this morning, and I thought they looked like the best prospect so far. I just didn't know specifically what would be a good choice for a 15 year old -- so thanks so much for your help! I may be contacting everybody here at one time or another to see what you think about a specific kit.

We are going to visit my son's grandfather for Christmas, who is dieing of bone cancer and is also an Aspie. I kind of thought they could possibly work on a kit together, and it might not be too taxing for Grandpa. I am also, of course, hoping that my son will become interested enough in the electronics side of things to have it become an additional interest as well as video games. He has mentioned an interest in robotics, so I think the kits might be a good way to start him off on the right direction.

The book: http://www.makershed.com/product_p/9781449309879.htm

The kit with all the parts referenced by the book: http://www.makershed.com/Getting_Starte ... lick=37845

Atmel AVR MCUs (used by Arduino) strike a very good balance between complexity and power. They're pretty easy to get to "hello world" with (blinking a LED, then reading a button to make the LED turn on and off), and have more than enough capabilities to go far beyond that point.

They're kind of expensive, and they go through Butane like there's no tomorrow, but if he has ADD and you have concerns about hot objects attached to extension cords, consider a butane soldering iron as well. I have one, and haven't touched any of my electric soldering irons since getting it a couple of years ago for Christmas: http://www.amazon.com/WSTA6-Pyropen-Sel ... 166&sr=8-3

I'm sure this is totally budget-busting, but if you want something to aspire to for next year if he gets turned on by robots:

http://www.robotshop.com/robobuilder-cr ... it-12.html

or, breaking the budget a little harder, the one I own:

http://www.robotshop.com/robotis-bioloi ... kit-3.html

At the more affordable end of the spectrum, by next Christmas, there are going to be a TON of robot platforms that use old Android phones or iPhones as their controllers. Right now they're all too advanced for a 15 year old (or at least, a 15 year old with no background in either robotics or programming), but next year, you should have no trouble finding one for $100-150 where you'll basically just strap in the phone and connect to either the USB port or the headphone jack (lots of robot designs use the phone's headphone jack to do bitbanged SPI, or use the audio input and output to emulate a modem).

[Moved from General Autism Discussion to Computers, Math, Science, and Technology]

my suggestion is get on ebay or abebooks and get a copy of the ARRL Handbook circa 1974.... when it was full of do-able and easily understood projects and not the mutation that passes for the ARRL Handbook these days........

surely a two dollar junk shop or ebay soldering iron will do all you want ... a copper bit on a gas ring in the kitchen is perfectly usable..... be wary of using too small an iron fr the job.

regards and ask Q if you want .....

I have to respectfully disagree. The old ARRL handbook is just going to confuse and frustrate him, and a cheap soldering iron in the hands of a 15 year old will just destroy the parts. I know. I was 15 once, and destroyed plenty of expensive ICs with excessive heat.

For now, stick to a ready-made Arduino module (which takes care of the annoying little details a kid with ADD is likely to overlook until it's too late, like voltage regulation and 5v-tolerant i/o). I personally put the logical "newbie" progression something like this:

use GPIO to illuminate a LED.

read a switch, and respond to it by illuminating a LED

figure out how to directly drive a 7-segment single-digit LED from the MCU's GPIO pins (AVRs can source and sink up to 20mA per pin. As long as you stick at least some kind of reasonable resistor between the i/o pin and LED pin, you can safely drive all 7 elements plus the dot without damaging the MCU).

figure out how to drive a 4-digit 88:88-type display by wiring 8 pins in parallel to each digit's anodes, and wiring 4 i/o pins to the cathodes

figure out how to drive a 4x16 HD44780 character-type LCD (this is a more advanced step than the LED project, because LEDs can light up in visibly garbled ways if you screw up. In most cases, a mistake to the LCD interface or logic will display nothing at all).

learn how to reimplement the previous two circuits using 74HC595 shift registers to conserve GPIO pins by bitbanging SPI.

reimplement the shiftregister circuit using the USART for SPI instead. Don't skip the bitbanging step, though... bitbanging is easy, and it will prove to you that your circuit and logic actually WORKS. SPI-via-USART is an entire topic unto itself, and you'll be thankful you bitbanged it first.

learn how to use PWM to modulate the brightness of a LED. This will come in handy later when he wants to spin motors.

now do it with a RGB LED to get different colors.

I recommend holding off on "serial" interface projects until he's mastered driving LEDs and reading switches, and has gotten his feet wet using the USART to do SPI first. Why? Because getting an AVR to reliably do serial i/o is a major biatch. Head over to avrfreaks.net, do a search for something like "usart problem", and let the 12,000 results be a stern warning that it's not as easy as it looks (partly, because Atmel's fscking datasheet STILL, after 7+ years, has broken example code that literally can't work on a mega48/88/168/328 because Atmel moved key registers to i/o addresses that SBI/CBI/SBIC/SBIS literally can't address, and partly because if you try to use it without an external crystal with UART-friendly frequency, your likelihood of getting any baudrate faster than 2400 to work reliably is almost nil).

Once he's mastered LEDs, switches, PWM, shift registers, character-mode LCDs, SPI, and serial communication, he's ready to move on into more interesting stuff... like robots