Great tribute.

I almost never get electronics related gifts (other than from element14).

Everyone assumes they couldn't choose something that I don't already have, or that I need, or that I want. (and they are probably right)

However, when I was just starting out on my career, I was given perhaps the most important electronics instrument you can have.... a DMM. At that time, around 1980, DMMs were not cheap, so it was an awesome gift (that I couldn't afford) and it saw a lot of use. The givers couldn't be expected to find a store that carried Flukes, but they bought the best meter they could find at Radio Shack. It helped both my career and my hobby.

Thank you Mum and Dad.

Yep, I've got that book too! Good choice.

The book was one of the first I read when I got involved with Pi's. Now I just wish I could retain the stuff:(

My best electronics related gift (this was Christmas) was a book called "Programming the Raspberry Pi" by Simon Monk. It was great for three reasons:

(1)     My son chose and bought it for me...it wasn't on a list of gift ideas

(2)     I could pick it up during the day and have a look through it without appearing rude to everyone else. Had I sneaked off to the shed to rev up a new drill I'm sure it would be noticed....so techy books make great gifts IMO

(3)     I knew nothing about Python and the book was a great introduction

The best electronics gift I had received was just 3 years back when I was in 12. I had just completed a 2 day electronics workshop organized in our school where we made a simple line follower. So, on requesting my father he brought me this kit which had all small electronics components and importantly a breadboard.

I still have keep the box though now storing some other things also.

Since, then I have learned a lot attended many other workshops student fares. I recently just made a Raspberry Pi lane follower which uses Computer Vision to navigate between the lanes. http://bit.ly/SelfDriveV1 I have been a quick learner but would like to make some more of AI related projects particularly NLP (with services like Snips and Alexa API) with the tech because the field is moving ahead very fast.

My story was simple. I looked forward for Christmas to get science type toys. But back then it was hard to keep me busy after going into some of these except one. That was the Radio Shack Science Fair Electronic Project Kit 201. It had a cover of a kid playing with a brown box with gadgets. The one I liked the best was a single transistor. This was before I even knew what bread boarding was. I think I even wore the same type of shirt. Add a pen protector and I was ready for school .

Although not the picture below, it had the same system of springs to attach wires.

The board even had a small solar panel. For hours, I would shine a little flashlight in the dark to

see a meter flip to the right when electricity flowed.                                                                          

This Christmas it would be fun to breadboard the Raspberry Pi 3 to bring back that same project.

All that is needed is a solar panel to generate sound on the phat board with sound.

Given a flash light and a little slight of hand, I could even play Jingle bells for the season of giving.

Thanks for reading this small story and I hope it inspires your mind for even better ideas.

Merry Christmas to you and yours!

Clem

Much in the same vein as many others, I'd have to say that the best gift I ever received was my first computer that I could call my own. Before that, I was sharing an old 386SX/16MHz with 4MB of 30-pin SIMM RAM and a MFM 40MB Miniscribe Hard Drive with a Hercules-compatible graphics card in MDA mode driving a 12" green-on-black CRT with my Dad. That dinosaur really struggled with Windows 3.1, so it was mainly a MS-DOS machine which we ran Lotus 123 and Wordperfect 5.1 on most of the time. I did a bit of dabbling with Qbasic and DbaseIV, but there wasn't anything particularly fun about that machine, except that it really got me interested in computing.

I fondly remember it - it was a second-hand 486DX2/66Mhz with 16MB of EDO 72-pin SIMM RAM, Seagate 428MB hard drive, Philips 2X (MPC2-qualified) CD-ROM drive, Creative Soundblaster 16, Trident VLB VGA card with 1MB of VRAM, Sony 3.5" Floppy Disk Drive and a Hipro 200W AT Power Supply. It came bundled with a 15" Compaq-branded colour CRT monitor. This was in the days when my Dad had recently purchased a brand-new AMD K6-2/300MHz system with 64MB of SDRAM, Fujitsu 5.2GB Hard Drive, Diamond Data 36X CD-ROM, S3 Trio 64V+ 2MB GPU and Avance Logic ALS100 SB-compatible sound card with a 15" Acer colour CRT monitor. The rationale was that he could see that I liked computers very much - but he didn't want me messing with or potentially breaking his new computer ... so I got one of my own.

That machine really soldiered on for a number of years. The monitor was the first to go, along with the Windows 95 install, so I got another second hand 15" colour CRT (Digital branded) and got it back up and running by installing Windows 95 from a boot disk and CD-ROM. I learned about how to set up the drivers for the system, the BIOS settings and about the hardware - as my primary school had an IT-savvy volunteer who picked up a bunch of ex-business 486's to donate to the school and she let me rummage the surplus units for parts. I soon learned how to get a primary and secondary IDE channel running on the board, thus allowing me to shove an additional Quantum Maverick 528MB hard drive for some extra expansion. I also grabbed enough bits to build myself another computer based on a Compaq Prolinea 486SX2/50, which I upgraded to 12MB RAM with a decent 2x220MB hard drive arrangement. As I had no spare CD-ROM drives, I learned how to use a null-modem cable and Laplink to transfer the data from the install CD to the other computer's hard drive to make installation less painful. I even remember the serial number of the OEM installation disc I had from back then!

It truly was a machine I called my own - from learning about which way the ribbon cable goes to replacing CMOS batteries, I really "cut my teeth" on it as I wasn't afraid of breaking anything, having amassed enough parts to overcome almost any catastophe. While my brother enjoyed playing the classics (i.e. DOOM, Duke Nukem, etc), I spent most of my time learning about the OS and optimising systems - I learned MS-DOS and several tricks (e.g. EMM, memmaker, doublespace/drvspace) and proceeded to Windows 95, 95 Plus, 98 and 98SE with those machines (including learning about various registry edits, woeful defragmentation tools, page file optimisation, etc).

My next upgrade was a Pentium I 133MHz non-MMX machine which I also kept for way too long ... upgrading it with 48MB RAM, dual 2.1GB Hard drives, USB 2.0, a 56k modem and 52x CD burner.

- Gough

I’m a long way off having a grandchild (I hope). My son is 11! But, yes. That would be cool.

That is to bad.

Be a neat experience to have a grandchild build something with the kit you used as a kid.

A picture of that is a connection for a lifetime.

Sean