My wife impulse bought some cheap radio kits and its finally time to do something with them.
A couple of nights ago I spent a few, surprisingly stress free, hours putting together a wireless transmitter and reciever. These were from a kit bought on facebook by my wife. My daughters are GirlScouts and as such my wife follows a couple of GirlScout groups on Facebook keeping an eye out for things just like this. I would link to those groups here but I don’t actually use facebook myself. However, the seller we got our kits from is on etsy as FairyWoodworks and she offers the kits with girlscout patches.
I was also able to find the same kits on AliExpress and Amazon.
Here is the label in case you’d like to look them up yourself, and here is the finished kit.
Each kit comes with all the parts to assemble one transmitter and one reciever, with a few additional screws thrown in for good measure, and even a screwdriver was thrown in with mine. These kits were pretty easy to assemble by hand with no additional tools. Everything screws into the board, and then all of the outputs on the reciever are jammed into a couple of lugs that fit to the board with some pins.
Two tips I can give from the install though; First, sort your screws, there should be two to three long screws for the push connectors, and two longer but slightly less long screws for the transmitter circuit board. The instructions don’t tell you this, I figured it out by trial and error. Second, if you get the lugs like I did you are expected to fit the leads from two LEDs, the speaker, and two wires under them. I could not. I think this was a known error as the version I saw on Ali Express has a third push connector instead of the lug connector. I solved this by ommiting the speaker as this is for young kids and that… that would get annoying. We can still use it by setting it on the lug with the legs touching. Third, you may have to build these kits from pictures alone as the reviews on Ali Express and Amazon suggest that at least some of the kits come packed with Chinese instructions, but they aren’t too hard to figure out.
These work reasonably well for a kit that was less than 10 US dollars, the response can be a little laggy at times, and the lights don’t react fast enough for morse code at any real speed. Since none of us can yet understand morse code its not the end of the world.
Overall I think my kids will have a blast assembling these and I don’t see any problems with my 5 year old and 8 year old putting these together. It’ll be fun to send some basic Morse Code messages and find other ways to communicate with the two lights the kit provides. We can also spend some time playing with my Software Defined Radio dongle and see if we can figure out what frequency these things transmit on, since they don’t actually say anywhere in the kit.
Please consider buying a Cuppa on Ko-Fi!