Here, kit, kit...

Do you remember Heath? No? Eico? Paco? If not, you're probably under 40 and have never practiced electronics as a hobby. Once upon a time, these three companies and others offered test instruments as kits of components. You—the buyer—provided assembly labor and quality assurance, honing your soldering and troubleshooting skills in the process.

Unfortunately, a combination of factors, including loss of free time, loss of interest in hobby electronics, economic pressures, and unfortunate management decisions, ended the days of mass-marketed instrument kits. You can't buy test equipment in kit form today...or can you?

Kits for instruments are indeed still available, but they differ from Heathkits in a number of ways. For starters, changes in technology made some kits obsolete—scratch tube testers and high-voltage power supplies—and regulatory and legal forces have influenced designs. Instead of jousting with safety agencies and bringing AC line voltage into a kit, contemporary kits' designers are likely to opt for battery or "wall wart" power. Fragile glass and high voltages inspire great caution in legal minds, and the CRT-based oscilloscope kit may be gone forever.

Documentation accompanying some of today's kits lacks the level of detail you'd find in Heathkit's gold-standard multipage assembly instruction manuals and may consist of only a few cryptically worded and sparsely illustrated pages.

You're also likely to encounter kits that consist of a printed-circuit board and bags of parts, but that don't include a case to house the completed board. Getting sheet metal enclosures designed and fabricated in quantity remains a major expense and a technical headache for a small-scale kit producer for whom a hundred kits constitutes a major production run. Vendors who do offer kits with cases use off-the-shelf, plastic enclosures that require minimal changes and are easily worked with basic shop tools.

Some of today's kits take advantage of low-cost and versatile microcontrollers. For example, one kit that I assembled can determine a three-leaded semiconductor's generic identity (i.e., FET, bipolar transistor, etc.) and measure a few of its parameters in seconds. Not bad for $50 and a few hours of my time.

The next time that you call, "Here, kit, kit," you just might be surprised by what answers.