Lego Radio from Littlebits

This doesn't just look like a radio, it is a radio. Littlebits is an electronics company. they talk a good game about "democratizing hardware" and prototyping but mostly they are a purveyor of modular electronics kits and Arduino mods.  It's a small market, but they make the best of it, selling smart kits to smart kids.

The "Radio bit" is a cool kit up for possible manufacture. It has three modes: Auto search, Extended Auto search and Manual Tuning like a normal desktop radio. And like the common hotel models the headphone cable doubles as the antenna wire.

Gakken Mini Denchi Block Experiment Kit

I don't have ads on this blog. But I don't mind mentioning products (usually music, books or toys) that I own and enjoy. So it is in that vein that I admit that I bought a set of Gakken Denchi Blocks.[LINK]  The full size kits are harder to find and more expensive so this is probably all I'm going to shell out for. The Mini Denchi Block Experiment Kit on Makershed bears the following description:

"If you're interested in learning about transistors and calculating current flow, this Gakken Mini Denchi Block Experiment Kit is the perfect thing for you. This 25 block Denshi Kit requires you to mount components related to basic electronics; from basic assembly of speaker and switch components, to the decals. In addition, each cube contains one part - a wire, resistor, transistor, diode, LED, capacitor, etc. for building the suggested circuits. MKGK37 Gakken Mini Denchi Block"

(Gakken also made the Robotek toys back in the 1980s if you remember those.) These Denchi blocks are something like a cross between Legos™ and a breadboard. Not the kind of breadboard you make a Dagwood on, no. This is the kind of breadboard we use to prototype circuits. The blocks are working circuit board components that you can move around. You can even make a radio.

Toy Transmitters

This idea has really run it's course. With the new popularity of mobile devices with children, hearing their voice come out of the radio loses it's gestalt.With modern technology these transmitters can be the size of a grain of sand. A single component on the tiny circuit board inside your smartphone. But few smart phones have AM or FM transmitters. The iPod in particular actually had an FM tuner chip in the first series but Apple refused to enable it. They saw radio as their enemy. Free content is, and has always been, the enemy of paid content. For all of these forces and many others, these toys are now extinct.  Unless you want to build your own. More here.

Take Sonic Devices in Woodside, NY for example. They were selling the "world's smallest FM transmitter" and advertising it as "half the length of a regular length cigarette." This device was copyrighted in 1968 and advertised from 1970 to 1973 in Popular Mechanics. It was $19.95.  In 1976 they were even named  in federal hearing on Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance by a National Commission for the Review of Federal and State Laws Here was a tiny device hypothetically usable in espionage available for under $20. They stopped selling it in the mid 1970s and started advertising a "lie detector" it was just a galvanometer for $29. It's actually the same device as the Scientologists kooky e-meter. Sonic Devices seems to have closed up shop by 1979.


Imperial electronics was selling a less petite, but equally effective AM transmitter for $12.95 in the same era. Imperial dates back to at least 1968 (possibly as early as 1953), selling security gadgets like light-sensitive alarms. In 1970 they were selling another security gadget, this one using microwaves to detect motion.They too were named in those Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance hearings. But having a primary business in paranoid security devices they backed away slowly from the toy transmitter.