Electronics for Kids

FOREWORD

There’s something special about bringing a project to life that you read about in a book or that started as an idea in your head. And sometimes the simplest things are the most satisfying.

One of my favorite childhood projects was a mischievous little device made of a single resistor connected between the tip and ring of a telephone line. I used a piece of one-sided copper circuit board with rub-off symbols to lay out the design, and then I etched the unprotected copper away using ferric chloride in my basement. You could still use the phone normally to make outgoing calls, but anyone calling the house would receive a busy signal. This was the perfect way to make sure my parents didn’t receive any phone calls from my teachers during ...