Maker SHED

Great for learning electronics and circuit design! The Gakken EX System is a series of educational electronics kits produced in the late 1970s. The kits use "denshi blocks" (also known as electronic blocks) to allow electronics experiments to be performed easily and safely. More than 25 years after its original release, one of the main kits from the series was reissued in Japan in 2002 and now you can get it here! Includes an instruction manual in Japanese, plus we've got English PDF instructions right here, under the How-To tab.

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• Illustrated instructions in English (PDF)
• Experiment Highlights
• Troubleshooting Tips

A denshi block (or electronic block) is a small plastic box containing an electronic component. Each block has conductive metal strips on its sides, and when two blocks are placed side-by-side, their metal strips touch allowing electricity to flow between them. The top of each block is labeled with a schematic representation of the component it contains. A circuit is built by placing a configuration of denshi blocks in a two dimensional grid. Because of the two dimensional layout and the labels on the blocks, a configuration of blocks resembles a schematic of the circuit. While most denshi blocks are of a standard size, there are some larger blocks for containing complex components. In particular, the synthesizer block and the FM tuner block are much larger, occupying an area 4x5 standard blocks and 3x6 standard blocks, respectively.