Gakken Ex-System

I bought one of these many years ago. Extremely unreliable and inflexible. Worse than even the springy Rat Shack ones.

I really wish someone would put together a decent kit and guide these days. I did consider designing and marketing something myself for a couple of years but I never got past the conceptual stage. It wasn't going to be a "here's a load of instructions to follow" but experiments that lead to "why" through instruction rather than just mechanical reproduction of circuits verbatim. Even all the Make stuff is pretty lame shiny marketing crap with few explanations and intuition being developed.

I have spoken to a lot of people who bought a load of stuff and learned how to plug things into things and copy and paste code. When it comes to "I want to solve problem X" there are too many gaps which leads to demotivation and large lots of arduino crap being sold in bulk on eBay.

I own a Gakken GMC-4 microcomputer, which appears to be a remake of the FX-System. It's a fun little 4-bit computer with a hex keypad for input. For output, there's 7 LEDs, 1 7 segment digit lcd, and a speaker.

It has 16 instructions, one of which is an escape code to a further 16 built-in IO routines. It has 96 4-bit words of actual memory plus some memory mapped registers. Loads and stores can only target the data segment, the top 16 words in memory; it has one 4-bit wide index register that allows indexed access as well.

It's a fun challenge to do something interesting in that constrained environment, but since there's no non-volatile storage of any kind, you have to tediously key in (admittedly necessarily short) programs each time it's powered up.

15 years ago I stumbled across Gakken, because they released a super cheap little synthesizer, controlled by a stylus. It sounds really cool and there exist even hacks to replace the stylus with a MIDI input. I bought one and it is the oldest item in my box of things that I will come back to when I have some free time :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALla261Zuo8

I owned one of these. The experiments were so-so. The magic of building blocks this way inspired to creation, however as someone else wrote - they are extremely unreliable.

I have never heard that name. Unfortunately the article does not seem to mention in what countries those kits were sold.

Having grown up in Germany I remember the name Kosmos. They seem to still exist. Not sure whether they were the most common / best ones. There is even a forum dedicated to the topic of electronic experimenting kits (in German): https://www.experimentierkasten-board.de/

Edit: Based on http://www.elektronik-labor.de/Lernpakete/Ebaukaesten.html I'd conclude that in the 1960s Kosmos was technically/didactically the leading one. In the 1970s probably surpassed by Philips. From the pictures I remember my friend had a Philips, the spring contact system was really good.

> Some circuits require apparatus which are unsuitable for putting inside blocks, for example, a crystal earpiece. These have wires which terminate in flat metal contacts, and they are connected to the circuit by sliding the contacts between the metal strips of two neighbouring blocks.

Surely, it is not impossible to produce a block that houses a 1/8" jack???

If you are looking for something like this try:

- https://shop.elenco.com/consumers/brands/snap-circuits.html

- https://upperstory.com/spintronics/

Reminds me of Scatron (sold in Spain in the 90s)

https://jvgavila-com.translate.goog/aypetronic.htm?_x_tr_sl=...

Ah, so this is where Varmilo ste^W gets the inspiration for their hipster gear.

https://varmilo.com/products/shurikey-hanzo-keyboard

My dad picked one of these up at a garage sale in like 1990. It seemed like a great idea but I don't think I learned anything from it, other than that transistors broke my fundamental concept of electrical circuits.

So, what's a great kit to recommend today?

I had this back in the 1980s and I learnt a lot about electronics from it. Was one of my favorite kits!