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Father's Day Badge-a-Thon: Quality Time King

spannerspencer

Adaptability is the cornerstone of fatherhood. Well, it probably should be. Whether it is or not, I'll leave for mothers and partners to decide upon!image

 

But, in an effort to embrace this notion, today's Father's Day badge has taken a twist. I've adjusted it in accord with some excellent suggestions you guys about creating projects with the kids.

 

"Did anyone else see the title and expect that it'd be "what toys have you made for your boys (or girls)". That's what being a dad's really all about," astutely pointed out, which agreed with.

 

"Perhaps one of the future days will cover Projects on the Dads To Do List," he says. "Cool things like Retro Arcade System, Club house, Doll house and of course expanding the body disposal area for when your girls reach the teen years and you need to get rid of "problems" ;-)"

 

So, other than undetectable methods of dissolving the tormented remains of your daughter's boyfriend in industrial chemicals, tell us about any projects, games, kits or other activities your parents made with you (all those long years ago) that got you into electronics, so we can take some inspiration for enthusing future generations.

 

  • Tell us all about them in the comments below, and maybe include a few photos to really help us set that nostalgic mood!
  • @mention another element14 member in your comment, and nominate them to post their parental project story.

 

And remember you'll need to already have the previous Father's Day badges in order to be crowned a Quality Time King.

Top Comments

  • It wasn't until I had joined the Marine Corps that I started to work with electronics.  Back when you had to actually use individual chips to upgrade memory instead of the easy peasy can only fit one way upgrades available now.  :-)  Constantly upgrading and repairing military use equipment was a great introduction to showing how you can mod/repair items and not just buy a completely new item. 

     

    Interestingly enough my wife was actually introduced to electronics as a child since her Father believed in building his own computer and bought all the parts in kit form and she helped build it.

     

    I am curious to hear how someone like was introduced to electronics.  The Fine staff at Element 14 get such great opportunities to see new tech and play with old tech that SuperHero Origin stories would be interesting!  ;-)

  • Like many others, my interest in electronics didn't come from my parents, it was an uncle who bought me my first electronics kit, something like this - but without a 7 segment LED and IC amp - far too hi-tech for the 70's!!  A family friend moved me onto my first solderless breadboard which I think I still have some 25 years later!

    160-in-1-kit-small.jpg 4267_1.jpg

    Fast forward a few years and my father came through, a local AV hire and repair shop used to provide him with all the TVs, VHS recorders and CD players that they deemed 'beyond economic repair', which as most of you know means either:

     

    1. It's too old to bother with as a new item costs less and works better

     

    or

     

    2. The fault is that much of a pig that we've had enough of trying to fix it!

     

    Up I grew, so did my collection of junk, I bought a house = more space to store that junk = more junk please

     

    The local reference library was a veritable mine of useful information when it came to circuit diagrams for TV chassis et al, and photocopying the pages at 5p / sheet wasn't too bad either.

     

    Even if it couldn't be fixed, these items contained a plethora of useful components that the careful application of a soldering iron and a solder 'pullit' would have removed and stored in no time, alas I gave that activity no time either . . .

     

    I've had to stop now, had to clear out the bulk of the junk that lain unfixed for years . . .

     

    I should have had a sign over my garage, a sort of reworking of the John Lewis mantra

     

    "Never knowingly unsoldered"!

     

    John Wiltrout shared a similar story about his father feeding his interest in electronics in his blog Analyzing and Hacking a Power Supply Board

     

    Even if your father doesn't share your interest (or thinks Ohm is the sound you make during meditation) then they can have a profound effect on shaping you.

     

    Come one John, time to chip in!

  • For this King (wife says I can be King If I believe it) the beginning many years ago did not come from my parents directly.  My Grandmother allowed me to have one of her many TUBE radios that I could disassemble and also repair to make work again.  GrandDad had two hand built radios that used the old A or B style batteries around the beginning of the 1900"s.  The TUBE radios got me to where I could take most AM radios and "tune" them to receive stations from greater distances that they were set for!  I then got an Upright Philico and a wall mount goose neck wooden phone.  I repaired both and to this day I can plug them in and they still "sing" of the AM.  I know that many of you out there enjoy "tinkerin" with stuff like this; after all we are of the generation that decided that you just don't purchase something to use for a short time and just throw it out.  Today you purchase things, knowing that if under $100us that it is considered a "throw-away" and not to be bother by.  So let us enjoy reading of your stuff!

  • I think my story will probably be similar to some others - my parents never really had skills in electronics and only had the slightest interest. I really have my teachers, and the local electronics shop (since defunct) to credit for getting me started along this path - which I had blogged about in the past.

     

    I got into some repair mainly because of my thriftiness, and had some opportunities because of the teachers who trusted me and gave me some of their time and access to some of the stuff they had so I could take them home and have a play with them too. Nothing really went to waste, and a silly habit of keeping things (broken and functional) "just in case" developed because of that.

     

    I suppose the one thing I see is that it's getting easier to get into the "maker" space with lots of "enabling" platforms, but the nature of electronics has changed. Less of it is about playing with analogue electronics - e.g. good ol' 555 timer style stuff, and much more of it is microcontroller based instead with "plug in" modules and "libraries" to make things easy to "glue" bits together. But in doing so, I think lots of people missed out on the basic skills of soldering and basic analogue electronics you need to make those real-world interfaces to meet your particular needs, rather than getting something off the shelf.

     

    I suppose my story has some similarities to in the sense that it was very much an "independent" adventure, enabled by my parents (primarily financially), but not so much guided or facilitated by them. They couldn't teach me how to solder, and they wouldn't know what an Opamp was.

     

    - Gough

  • I think like many, I started out as an 'un-maker'. I had the job of dismantling old electromechanical office equipment such as Dictaphone voice recorders, early storage and retrieval systems (pre-word processors), etc. and some radios and televisions.

     

    My first electronics kit would have been the Philips 'Radionics x40'

    http://www.radiomuseum.org/images/radio/philips_gb/radionic_radio_and_electronic_kit_1612739.jpg

    which comprised of a multipurpose reusable PCB which you physically bolted discrete components into in order to create radios etc. Unfortunately the threads on the component carriers were somewhat long and I recall that it was rather time consuming to spin the nuts and washers up using the box spanner provided. It however did mean the components were reusable and you didn't need a soldering iron and as the kit was powered from lantern batteries it was fairly portable. One of the downsides to the kit though was as it was a PCB then it made it more difficult to adapt/build your own circuits. Later kits that followed used spring terminals and jumper wires so more flexible like breadboard. Looking back I think another downside was that it perhaps lacked some of the supporting educational content and I seem to recall that there was a tendency to end up building the circuits 'parrot fashion' as opposed to learning from it. In those days if you didn't understand something, then there was no Internet online community to fall back on.

     

    At the same time I already had access to a number of Fischertechnik construction sets

    fischertechnik GmbH - Products

    and this was taken to a completely new level when Richard Pawson published his 'The Robotics Book'

    http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/PRODPIC-10151.jpg

    as it included robot projects for both Lego and Fishertechnik along with example code for the ZX Spectrum, BBC micro and Commodore VIC 20 microcomputers which were popular at the time. The book included the 'BBC Buggy' mentioned earlier by

    https://www.element14.com/community/community/members/blog/2016/06/17/fathers-day-badge-a-thon-the-maker#comment-86656

    and then went on to show how to turn it into an XY pen plotter. To this day I still think that it was an excellent book published at the right time and it opened up  an alternative avenue to the home micro which were rapidly becoming games consoles for the majority of people. It also had the right balance between history of robotics, practical applications, technologies then allowed you to get your hands dirty by building some which actually worked.