EEVblog #1163 - Xmas Mailbag

Xmas Mailbag

SPOILERS:
Mand Labs electronics learning kit:
(yes, 27 minutes of it)
27:08 Petzl climbing harness
33:20 RC2014 home brew DIY Z80 computer kit
39:00 Custom test leads
40:40 Aircraft 121.5MHz emergency beacon and altitude sensor teardown
51:30 Monero miner, and some Linux GPL hate!

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[rlarsen]

I work in Norwegian Maritime Search and Rescue, last year we had a 121.5MHz beacon go off, and it sounded like it was pretty close. We tried ground and ship based direction finders for about a day with no luck as all signs pointed to it being on-shore. So we dispatched a Sea King rescue helicopter with a direction finder and it tracked it to a local recycling plant. We sent an operator out with handheld direction finding equipment and he found an old beacon that had a change by date of mid 1993 on the battery. So yeah, those suckers can be a pain if they go off accidentally ;)

[boelwerkr]

About the accelerometer switch.
It is build around a magnet. The tube is a magnet an the screw on one side and the contact bars on the other side are made from iron (plated with gold for good contact) The magnet will loosely stick to the screw but very firm to the big contacts. If a shock can loosen the magnet from the screw it will stick to the bigger contacts, and stay there until its pushed back to the screw with the reset button. The distance of the magnet to the contacts determines the force need to make it moved the closer they are the less force i needed. But such system is not very accurate, really exact measurements are not possible but it is good enough to detect a crash. :-)

[longdarkrideatnight]

This kit is for impressing the people that pay for educational equipment, and materials. The administrators are the customer.
Most teachers and schools teach to a set of learning objectives, these are set by national or state bodies. Kits like this are built to allow administrators, to buy a system that fills the lesson objectives, and then wash their hands of the process. Actual learning is left up to the teachers, if they have the skill work around the product, or if not simply follow the products proscribed plan.

If you attend a teaching technology show or conference. The sales pitch is all about which governments objectives are being met, or how many schools are using the product.
You can find products that are interested in student learning, but they are often at the back off the hall, and the teams are bright and energized people, who do not know know that the customers are not students.

[squidcaps]

I absolute agree, get lights flashing before you hit 5 minutes, literally. Battery, resistor and led. That is all you need for the first lesson. After they have lit that first LED, point out that the battery has two ends. You can switch the polarity of the LED to show also how semi-conductors work, make them reverse resistor too to point out the difference and... Practical examples, direct to results as fast as possible. Theory comes next, passion has to come first.

My school had the same system, theory first and we went thru every single parameter in the equation before we get to solder anything. Of course i had experimented at home, dad has a shop. It was horrible way of teaching anything, things were complete haze and you started to avoid making any assumptions until you got to the lab... since that was the place we actually learned. I did have horrible teacher in theory though, he was actually mechanical engineer, read direct from the book, didn't answer a single question with: "look it up from the book". Lab teacher was absolute miracle, tough, hard and merciless, we did not get to make any mistakes before passing many subjects, safety was zero tolerance policy, absolutely not a single mistake. Kicked our asses but answered every question, knew how to make quick (and very dirty) analogies.

[suzukichopper]

The random nut and bolt came from the cutters/strippers. It's the gauge stop so you can actually strip wire and not just cut it. That'd be a frustrating lesson to each a kid if they all lost that stop.

[VintageTechFan]

Since you asked for it:

My opinion is, especially for kids, show them something cool, let them do it and THEN explain how. And don't go too much into the details. NEVER teach something wrong, but leaving out special cases and side effects and the pitfalls of real world components for now is fine. You can add those details later.

The way they are doing it, you are lucky if your audience makes it halfway through without falling asleep or wandering off.

Also, absorbing random facts thrown at you is not how learning works. You need an application for it, or even better, you see something which makes you curious and THEN you get the info you WANT right now.

[freeman]

I agree with Dave. I think teach the exciting stuff first, circuits, wires, motors, led's, then later fill in the theory. Teaching the theory off the bat can turn kids off.

[ElectronicEnigmaZone]

It somewhat irks me about the statement at the end about "The curse of Linux". If you go back in time to when Unix and the C language was being developed at AT&T. AT&T was the only one who could call their OS UNIX. At the time being a Phone company monopoly they could not market and sell their new OS UNIX so one thing they did was give the tapes to Berkeley and so was born BSD. Between the two they made the OS what it is but since AT&T forbid anyone to call it UNIX everyone else who got a hold of the BSD tapes had to call their version something else like Sun-OS or IBM AiX, DEC OSF, HP-UX you get the picture. But still the OS was not in the hands of the hobbyist because the needed equipment was too expensive and out of reach of the average person. Along comes the revolution of the IBM PC, when 80286 and 80386 showed up it allowed end users to develop multi tasking OS's. But still the UNIX was not in reach of the average user and one big hiccup was a affordable C compiler, those suckers cost a lot. What Linus did was give us that UNIX like OS for basically no cost and Stallman of the GPL that you hate gave us GNU and this combination opened the door for everyone who wanted to develop applications in a UNIX like environment and a C compiler to do it that was basically at no cost to the user. Without Linux and without GNU you would not have today that Alexa, the Android phone, and millions of other devices that Linux and GNU made possible. You might hate Linux and you might hate GPL so be it but speaking you hate in letter does disrespect the thousands and thousands of developers that made all this possible and in a sense made Open/Free/NetBSD possible also.

Ps: I think those older Electronics kits with the 101/200/500 experiments and the board with the springy terminals and you just connected wires were the best as a kid I had one that was 200 circuits and I made that book pretty dog eared and worn out.

[Northerntar]

Yeah the Mand kit, that's a no from me. So much focus on packaging and presentation (and still manage to get it cringeworthy wrong) and having maybe 20 dollars worth of parts and tools. A kid doesn't need to know quantum theory before connecting a led. I think Dave and many others here could put together a fun educational experimentation kit with twice as much components at half the price.

[Gossamer]

QR Code 51:39 says "I seriously hope you guys don't scan this." Too late! :)

[RemcoStoutjesdijk]

Pro engineer with 25+ years experience here. Probably couldn't do the band gap / energy barrier / p-n junction talk if it saved my life. Enough already, the 3 nerds who want to know it can look it up on wikipedia.

[TommyCrosby]

I don't think this kit was built to target younger kids. It's more to the level of high school (13 years old) where they can comprend technical stuff and physics.

[karlharvymarx]

I liked the old 300 in 1 kits but quickly grew frustrated that I wasn't learning enough to get much beyond their pre-cooked circuits without letting the smoke out. I think I would have liked seeing a circuit that does something, followed by a practical explanation of how it works with footnotes to a section with equations, history, and theory. Examples of how sub-circuits can be combined would have been nice too. So I guess I wanted fun with the option to learn enough to have more fun beyond what the author came up with.

[Darphi]

Hi Dave, Looking forward to seeing you pout together that RC2014 Mini. I'm an avid Zilog fan and have engineered many systems based on the z-80. Also the z8001 and 8002 CPU's.

[tdabonde]

I'm for practical learning. My father started teaching me Phase and Hertz when I was little, I struggled to understand and got scared off for a long time. He was an elevator mechanic with a deep understanding of large scale multi phase electrical industrial plants. Problem was perspective, he forgot what it was like to be a blank slate, to not be able to picture electrons moving around a circuit and went into far to much detail to early.
I ultimately had to unlearn allot of things the hard way, by electrocution aha. But in all seriousness, rewinding a three phase generator taught me more than any book.

[bradinaccounting]

I'm 12 minutes in and I can honestly say that I'm shocked at the amount of air time Dave is giving this kit (and even with the amount of praise that's being heaped on it, with no mention yet of price). Is this a sponsored review?

Edit: Jesus christ. Covering the kit for 27 minutes?! The parts in this kit are essentially identical to the parts in 1, 000 other "basic electronics kit" packages, all of which can be picked up for $30, and which come in a simple plastic compartmented container which is actually practical for reuse, unlike this thing. I don't get it.

[NebukadV]

You see a well made and well organized kit - I see a lot of plastic, that will go to waste very soon in most cases.
You see high quality paper - I see paper, that is so heavily inked, that it is almost impossible to recycle.
I don't wanna ruin your enthusiasm and I know it's crucial, to get more ppl. to become engineers - but do we really need more and more of these kits? I got into EE without any of these kits and afaik so did all my EE friends.

[clkinder]

I would always contend that the practical usage should always be displayed first... As a (younger) person, I didn't care about how SPI worked on my Arduino, or how Java displayed an image on the display... I only cared that it did... I would say, even into college I would have liked to see this...

[OMO]

My dad would buy me electronics kits when I was 4 and we built them together. I had to identify the parts from the manual and give them to him to solder. Seeing how I could make a radio or a music generator or even a led flasher seemed like magic back then! I am now designing and building my own kits and really like electronics.In primary school they tried teaching us all of these super technical details which honestly felt really boring at the time. I think high school would be the best time for that, especially considering that people learn chemistery and they'll know about electrons and protons and whatnot by then.

[Ispike]

When I was a kid I bought Radio Shacks Basic Electronics book. It started out with basic physics that looks almost identical to what's in this book (right down to the tormented diode). That was my favorite part of the book. I didn't really care for the paint-by-numbers approach the most kits came with, I wanted to know why something worked the way it did. I think learning the fundamentals is necessary when starting out even for kids, just keep the underlying math to a minimum.