I still own a Philips Electronic Lab Kit. My par- much work to manufacture a brick.
ents gave it to me in 1975. It’s been stuffed away in Then I tried to stick a soldering nail through one
a box for more than 25 years. of the studs in a brick. It was easy and fast, giving
About a year ago, I felt the urge to tell my kids (who me the “eureka” effect.
were 5 and 7 at the time) about electricity, switches, The first brick was composed of a LED soldered
lamps, batteries, and basic circuitry. Digging out the to two nails. The solder forms a little bullet on the
old Philips Kit, I found that lots of parts were missing. bottom of the nail. Holes for the LED’s pins were
Unfortunately, Philips had discontinued it, and there made by sticking and removing a nail. For other
was no way to get replacement parts. bricks (transistor), a Dremel tool was used. Bricks
With my desire to avoid “vendor lock-in” schemes glue easily with super glue.
wherever possible, and my strong belief in open stan- For simple daisychaining, every pin of a compo-
dards, I was looking for a kind of OSS lab kit, easily nent needs to be connected to two nails.
expandable, cheap, fast to make, solid, and based Being too lazy to build bricks for all kinds of resis-
on standard pieces available almost everywhere. tors and capacitors, I found that looping their wires
Naturally, LEGO came to mind for the basic build- and blocking them with a nail/shoe provided a nice
ing blocks. They are very solid and you can buy the connection and avoided redundancy.
colorful plastic bricks almost anywhere (I had three My next steps: standards for bricks (e.g., color
boxes full). The colors allow for good categorization usage for transistors, like NPN: yellow and PNP:
of components. I bought some LEDs, prototyping red), creating LEGO CAD piece definitions, and
board, soldering nails, and shoes, the initial idea writing instructions for a set of circuits to build.
being that the soldering nails would be stuck to the
prototyping board, which somehow would be con- Do you have your own Homebrew story to share? Send it to us
nected to the LEGO brick. I tried, but it was too at
homebrew@makezine.com.
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