“I love doing projects elenco has a good product not just a sheet of paper with transistor values it comes with a book that teaches you what you are doing and why, it's more than some mindless soldering project it's a lesson you will use forever we need more like this.”
“The only downside is the instructions are a little over my head. I had a hard time figuring out how to help our 8 year old but once you get rolling, it was easier. He loved that he made it and it worked.”
“NOTE: This review is actually for the Elenco WeMake FM Radio Soldering kit, which is based upon this FM radio kit but which also includes a cheap, poor-quality soldering iron. Since the bulk of the product is identical in both kits, I am also including this review here. Just note that you won't get the soldering iron if you buy this version of the kit. (And that's a good thing, as you won't be wasting money on something that the experts will tell you not to bother with.)At first glance, this is an extremely promising kit: You get to learn soldering skills, and at the end you have a working radio. At least, that's the theory. Sadly, a combination of extremely poor design and quality control coupled with terrible documentation and an assumption that you already have electronics knowledge but yet somehow never learned to solder conspire to sink what could have been a great product.So what's wrong with the design? First of all, for a board aimed at total beginners, the traces and solder points are poorly positioned. For example, if you follow the instructions to the letter, you'll be told to solder the battery holder in place just a millimeter or so from no less than seven different solder points, most of which won't actually be soldered until the battery compartment is already fixed in place. Good luck not melting any of that plastic when you're supposed to be working so close to it.For another, you're expected to cut a tab off the varistor to get it to fit -- when Elenco could easily have just added one more hole to the PCB so that it fit properly in the first place. And then there are the numerous solder points which are separated from each other by just 2-3mm, when Elenco could easily have made the PCB just fractionally larger and given newbies a somewhat more forgiving first project.But by far the worst of all is the reliance on a digital tuner instead of an analog one. With an analog tuner, you could simply spin a varistor to tune the station you're looking for. Frequencies out of whack? That would be obvious and easily corrected. But no, you have a digital tuner which can only tune in one direction, and which has to be reset back to its starting point if you want to go in the other direction even slightly.Add in the fact that a coil is included in the kit which you are supposed to open up yourself to a specified dimension -- which, I might add, I measured with extremely accurate digital calipers to be sure I got it right -- and that the spacing of this coil determines whether or not you're actually tuned to the FM frequency range, and you have a recipe for disastrous conclusions.After spending a good while building everything -- and having quadruple-checked every component's placement and orientation, as well as ensuring that there are no shorts between separate traces -- I have made a radio which can do nothing more than play static. There's literally no way to tell whether my frequencies are too high or low, and since the useless digital tuner seems to treat every single static-filled frequency as a station, all you can do is press the frequency adjustment button dozens or hundreds of times with no clue whether you're even going in the right direction or the wrong one, hoping against hope for even the tiniest trace of something which *isn't* static. I never got one.And then there's the documentation, which goes into spectacular depth about how FM radio itself works, but then omits to even mention basics that a newbie might not know, such as which symbol in the schematics is used for which component type, what each component does and how it is used, or even whether many components have a polarity and need to be placed in a particular direction. Nor are you even told how the pins on the two ICs (one pre-soldered) are numbered, although this can at least be guessed by the educated user from the fact that two pins are numbered on the PCB. Thankfully I knew all of this already; many potential users won't.And once your creation is complete, the manual provides absolutely zero useful information about how to troubleshoot it if it doesn't work first time. You're told to check a handful of connections and components (mine tested fine), and given a list of voltages for the one presoldered chip on the board -- but you're not told for a single one of these which pins you're expected to test the voltage across. With absolutely zero guidance, I simply had to guess that I was supposed to check the voltage from the numbered pin to the negative terminal on the battery. I still have no idea if that's right; some of my voltages seemed to match, but others weren't even close. And once you've checked those voltages, there's not a single word in the documentation about what they mean, and what to check if they're incorrect.What the manual does do is to suggest that you add two components if sound is not clear. For one, there's not a single word as to what it does. That's not a problem though, as I couldn't add it anywa”
“So, recently, I bought a soldering iron and I needed a project to practice soldering on. I decided upon this kit based upon the fact that it's simple enough that a beginner should be able to do it. The instructions are easy to read and the kit is easy to assemble: it even gives you easy trouble shooting steps. I would definitely recommend having a multimeter and a soldering iron first, as one is necessary and the other super helpful. I'd recommend this for people just getting into soldering.”
