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