Rustin just sent me a link with a bunch of cool projects in it ( mostly electrical). Some of them I may implement into classes. It got me thinking that I have a untapped resource for cool electric projects - you.
What projects, lessons etc. did you do as a kid that excited you to learn about electronics/electricity?
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Depends on the age. If a little older, building an electric motor is pretty cool. I did a couple of those over the years.
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I had a few of the radio shack boards that have all the componants on a plastic or cardboard layout and a book of projects to connect them into different things, building a AM transmitter was the one that excited me the most.
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My first experiments with electronics was using an older model of the Electronic Snap Circuits® Kit - Model SC-300. It is great for messing around and getting some intuition for electronics as an absolute beginner.
The next foray into electronics was actually via the old Slot Car clubs. While the circuits were simple, the passion and excitement at building, wiring, and seeing them run was hands-down addictive.
After that I went down a programming rabbit hole, but eventually came back to electronics and built things like LED cubes. LED cubes are a good exercise because they start incredibly easy with something like an arduino being the only thing required besides the LEDs themselves, but as the cube gets bigger, you need to add on circuitry for demuxing, separating the driving signal from the current, figure out how to reduce pin requirements via common nodal construction, etc.
The most complicated “just for fun” thing I’ve worked on is a persistence of vision display; which requires the incorporation of high resolution sensors, either on-board power or figuring out power and signalling through a spinning joint, and precision timing (which gets into some lower intermediate MCU concepts like Timers with interrupts instead of looping and sleeping)
Anything that starts simple and can grow is great as a teaching / learning tool. Someone can start with a simple AM crystal radio project, add on an amplifier + filter to get larger sound, then go down the rabbit hole of electronic audio effects through digitizing the signal.
For more intermediate to advanced individuals, designing their own PCB and having it manufactured via PCBWay or one of the other rapid PCB vendors would be a good project.
For those with a pension for punishment, there are things like Tiny Tapeout where you design your own integrated circuit and get it put on a wafer for ~$300.
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