What was your first circuit? Do you still remember it?

[pknoe3lh]

When I was around 8 I think (... don't remember)
I saw a game:

http://www.kreativekiste.de/elektro/dem-heissen-draht-auf-der-spur

Next day (after terrorise my mother) we went to the local electrician to buy all the parts needed to rebuild this game 
Thats how I started   

[brucehoult]

Similar to other posts, I started with a Radio Shack 65 in 1 kit. The first circuit was probably the first one in the book. The first one I remember though was a crystal radio. It helped to have a 50KW station 10 miles from the house.

Yes, I lived much too far in the countryside, surrounded by hills, for a crystal set to work. A two valve radio had enough trouble pulling a signal! TV reception was more snow than picture, and on summer evenings it was quite common for a TV station in Australia (!! 2500+ km away) to overpower our local TV translator south of Kaikohe in New Zealand.

[daveyk]

A crystal radio receiver that could pick up a single local MW station during the evenings only    
I was at the 4th grade at school  then.

I remember doing a crystal radio using a corroded razor blade and a little whisker wire mounted above it and dragged acrossed It until a good "diode" junction occurred. That had to be early 1970's.


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[Hypernova]

Sticking mom's hairpin into the 110V socket. The resulting sparks gave me little rectangular blisters all over my palm for a week.

First actual circuit was the dicksmith electronic dice kit during electronics class in intermediate school. My first time soldering so two LEDs were stuck at on.

[Red Squirrel]

Sticking mom's hairpin into the 110V socket. The resulting sparks gave me little rectangular blisters all over my palm for a week.

First actual circuit was the dicksmith electronic dice kit during electronics class in intermediate school. My first time soldering so two LEDs were stuck at on.

Hahaha.  Suposedly when I was a toddler I crawled and pulled on the door/light switch with my mouth when my mom was loading groceries into the fridge.  It broke and I got a shock on my face and was all black. I wish she had taken a picture of that, but this is before the "someone needs help but let me take a pic first!" era. 

[JPortici]

don't remember the very first.. but this hooked me up while in highschool

found it looking around the interwebs...
http://www.erbadellastrega.it/letture/sintetizzatore/
italian vintage porn: http://www.introni.it/pdf/Radio%20Elettronica%201977_02.pdf
were never able to make the filter work, neither simulate it. this asshole used diodes as varible resistors, i blame it on 70's component's mojo

[bd139]

This was mine

[JPortici]

I WANT that kit. i just want it.

[NivagSwerdna]

When I was around 8 I think (... don't remember)
I saw a game:

http://www.kreativekiste.de/elektro/dem-heissen-draht-auf-der-spur

Next day (after terrorise my mother) we went to the local electrician to buy all the parts needed to rebuild this game 
Thats how I started   

A solar powered version (charging a battery over the long term) would make a great geocache... only open once you have navigated to the far end.

[joeqsmith]

I remember using a 9V transistor battery, wire and a small light bulb held together with masking tape.  The switch was pushing the wires together.  I think that was before making the circuit with a line cord, outlet and starting the small fire on my bed.   

[Kleinstein]

The first circuit I remember was in school, more or less try an error putting together 4.5 V batteries, lamps and switches. We somehow ended up in funny version that used 2 batteries, 2 lamps and a single, single simple switch in a way that either one or the other lamp was active.  It took me very long to find out how this could work and for this reason I still remember.

Probably this is still a nice puzzle for the beginners.

[daveyk]

That's a long way to recollect.

I guess in school one of our teachers had us use magnet wire to wrap around a ~5 inch long 1x piece of wood to make the primary tuning coil. There was a point scrapper we made in metal shop class that would stand off the hunk of wood that we mounted the coil on. That scrapper was probably connected to the bottom (he'd) side of the coil. The scrapper was then scrapped across the coil in a wide arc and could tune the coil. The top of the coil went to a rectifier diode. We experimented with numerous ones, but I recollect using a corroded razer blade and another small piece of metal above it with a slice in it. From the slice was a dangling piece of magnet wire just touching the razor blade. Free m that slice metal, if I recollect correctly we hooked a crystal earphone from there to the ground (bottom of the coil). Between adjusting the razor blade rectifier and tuning to the coil you could tune in one of the two local AM radio stations.

That was too cool. From there that led to a curiosity of electronics, CB Radio, Ham Radio and a career in electronics.

I very fondly remember Radio Shacks P-Box kits. I can remember building a shortwave radio from one, building the RF preamplifier kit and a audio amplifier kit. I mounted all of that in a shell of a drawer storage unit with a piece of 1/8" paneling as a front panel with the controls sticking out. I listened to The His an Her show on it from Radio Nederlands broadcasting from the lesser Antilles (or something like that). I remember playing their Easter egg hunt (a world geography quiz) and mailing in my answers, getting a QSL card from them and hearing my name and results on the shortwave air!!! I was in heaven back then. I wish I could go back in time a re-experience that and teach myself to better appreciate the experience and better remember it and that in the long run, it is the best time of life growing up with a wild eye curiosity. That thirst for knowledge back then is better than having the answers.

Of course I tore apart old TVs back then and actually managed to fix a couple. Tore apart radios. Fixed a BC348Q(?) B17 shortwave receiver and using it for years.  Later built a bunch of Heathkit stuff, which I have sold all of it except for the 2m transceiver. Sigh, I sold my youth. All that is left is quickly fading memories.




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[German_EE]

Back in the dim and distant past (yeah, I'm old) a magazine called Practical Wireless used to have a series called Take Twenty, simple circuits using less than twenty components. Well, I built a TRF radio from a Take Twenty design, I remember that it used a 2N2926G transistor and I built it by drawing the schematic on cardboard then pushing components through but that's about it.

Oh yeah, it didn't work first time, I learned fault finding at an early age.

[Red Squirrel]

This was mine

I actually have one in storage that is similar.  I need to actually dust it off some day and go through it again for nostalgia sake, and now I'd actually understand the stuff it explains. Back when I was a kid I just put the wires where it told me and was like "cool!" but did not know how it actually worked.


 

[bd139]

Yeah those kits certainly lacked explanation. This lead to the demise of mine when I decided to "work it out" blowing just about everything up in it 

Then I got the Forest Mimms book followed shortly after by The Art of Electronics (1st edition!) which actually made sense then.

Back in the dim and distant past (yeah, I'm old) a magazine called Practical Wireless used to have a series called Take Twenty, simple circuits using less than twenty components. Well, I built a TRF radio from a Take Twenty design, I remember that it used a 2N2926G transistor and I built it by drawing the schematic on cardboard then pushing components through but that's about it.

Oh yeah, it didn't work first time, I learned fault finding at an early age.

I got a load of those from a car boot sale once in the 1980s. Great magazine of the time! You can actually download old issues of it here: http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Practical_Wireless_Magazine.htm

Hardly anything in PW worked properly. It usually had poor designs based on particular transistor beta and recycled reject parts by the original authors.

[schmitt trigger]

My first fully electronics project that I actually built from scratch was a directly-mains powered, 5-tube amplifier. The vast majority of the components were salvaged from old radios.

I already understood the essential operational principles, having fully read Basic Electronics, by Van Valkenburgh, Nooger & Neville, but the negative feedback thing was a big mistery to me...so I just put a resistor and a capacitor network, which I copied from an old radio.

Days later, as I was listening to a vinyl record, my sister came to me: "I can listen to your music on my radio"
In disbelief, I went to her room and, indeed, my music was being broadcast on a spot within the AM band (560 - 1600 Khz).

It took me several years, while studying my EE degree, to realize that my kludgy negative feedback was actually positive feedback and the amplifier was oscillating like crazy, and the music would effectively modulate the oscillation and I had, in fact, built an AM transmitter!

[bjcuizon]

My first fully electronics project that I actually built from scratch was a directly-mains powered, 5-tube amplifier. The vast majority of the components were salvaged from old radios.

I already understood the essential operational principles, having fully read Basic Electronics, by Van Valkenburgh, Nooger & Neville, but the negative feedback thing was a big mistery to me...so I just put a resistor and a capacitor network, which I copied from an old radio.

Days later, as I was listening to a vinyl record, my sister came to me: "I can listen to your music on my radio"
In disbelief, I went to her room and, indeed, my music was being broadcast on a spot within the AM band (560 - 1600 Khz).

It took me several years, while studying my EE degree, to realize that my kludgy negative feedback was actually positive feedback and the amplifier was oscillating like crazy, and the music would effectively modulate the oscillation and I had, in fact, built an AM transmitter!

Nice! ..haha, Building an AM Radio transmitter from scratch without even knowing it. Great stuff!

[ManuelMcLure]

I don't remember what the exact circuit was, but it was made using a Denshi Block kit back in the 70s. We had several of these but the best was the SR-4A Deluxe: http://searle.hostei.com/grant/ElectronicKits/index.html#DenshiBlockSR4A

[bd139]

I already understood the essential operational principles, having fully read Basic Electronics, by Van Valkenburgh, Nooger & Neville,

I love the artwork in those books. I wish people made that much effort now.

[Zero999]

Hi, I found out that there were already threads about something like your first multimeter, etc. Now, I think sharing (and maybe talking) about our first circuit would be fun as all of us had our beginning days.  ...And hopefully, it could inspire and motivate some beginners and newbies too.

So here we go, let's start with mine.
Back in the day, when I was 8, I was really interested in analog audio stuff. I was not really interested in electronics back then, I just loved connecting wires (and lots of them) on audio systems . But while surfing on the web, I was directed to this circuit which says that the LEDs will light up depending on the intensity of the sound.

I then went to my local electronics shop to buy some parts and connected some bare wires to the transistor. And to my excitement, it worked perfectly!
This was a thing of beauty for me and so that's how I got into electronics.

Anyway, that was my beginning. What's yours?

Notice there's no current limiting resistors for the LEDs or transistor's base? You're lucky it worked and didn't blow up! I suppose it needed careful adjustment of the volume control.

[amspire]

My first circuit was a very common beginner's project in the '60s. A crystal AM band radio.

The interesting thing is that back then, it was easy getting all the parts such as the coil wire and former, the tuning capacitor, the germanium diode and the crystal earpiece. It was a pretty magical thing to get a decent quality radio sound from wire, metal plates that do not even touch and the little tube with two wires.

Back then, many of our older relatives lived through a period from when there was no electronics, almost no electricity, no recorded sound, no TV, no cars, no relativity and quantum mechanics and little instant communication through to the modern post war world of the 60's.

I think that particularly after the experiences of many in the war, being able to build a radio from scrap was a pretty amazing skill to have. People often had to find alternatives to the diode like galena crystals (lead ore) or razor blades.

Who would even know nowadays how to make a diode from a razor blade?

[Neilm]

I, like many people had a 50 in one kit.

I do remember one of my first circuits - it involved 2 AA cells, a small audio transformer and my little brother. Set me on electronics for life.

[brucehoult]

I, like many people had a 50 in one kit.

I do remember one of my first circuits - it involved 2 AA cells, a small audio transformer and my little brother. Set me on electronics for life.

Some form of oscillator or buzzer might enhance that circuit.

[bjcuizon]

Hi, I found out that there were already threads about something like your first multimeter, etc. Now, I think sharing (and maybe talking) about our first circuit would be fun as all of us had our beginning days.  ...And hopefully, it could inspire and motivate some beginners and newbies too.

So here we go, let's start with mine.
Back in the day, when I was 8, I was really interested in analog audio stuff. I was not really interested in electronics back then, I just loved connecting wires (and lots of them) on audio systems . But while surfing on the web, I was directed to this circuit which says that the LEDs will light up depending on the intensity of the sound.

I then went to my local electronics shop to buy some parts and connected some bare wires to the transistor. And to my excitement, it worked perfectly!
This was a thing of beauty for me and so that's how I got into electronics.

Anyway, that was my beginning. What's yours?

Notice there's no current limiting resistors for the LEDs or transistor's base? You're lucky it worked and didn't blow up! I suppose it needed careful adjustment of the volume control.

Haha! Good eagle eye there! For the leds I just used a board with leds that has the resistors for it from an old disassembled flashlight. For the transistor, it was medium power anyway, so I just connected it directly to the output of the pc soundcard.

[tooki]

Of course I remember!

It was a 'square' 4.5V battery and a light bulb.
As a kid, it was totally mind blowing to discover that you don't actually need a flashlight to light the bulb.

It was probably a 6V lantern battery (4.5V ones are not common in USA), but otherwise same for me, I'm sure! For a lot of us, probably!