Secondary2 Electronics Kit

I bought this for my 11 yr old girl for Christmas and it had a broken Multimeter (something rattling around inside and would not switch on) and it had a brokenbattery bay, so it was a complete disapointment to her and myself when it wouldn't work.I reported the problem on 27/12/10 to Grasshopper and they assured me a replacment Multimeter would arrive from the manufacturer within a week, over 2 weekslater and a follow up e-mail to grasshopper and an e-mail to the manufacturer and im still waiting.The idea of the kit is great, but the quality and after sales service (nobody kept me informed) is poor.I would have preffered to spend extra money and had a better quality product.

great item easy to use and the literature with it is also good, there are plenty of experiments that can be done with it.

I had high expectations for this kit, but ended up being disappointed. Firstly through the good points: it's well built, and much easier to put together than many other electronics kits. The box it comes in also serves as a useful storage place for the parts, there's a substantial vacuum moulding and the underside is labelled to help you put stuff away.On the negative side through there are some big let-downs. Firstly the documentation is dull and repetitive. Although there are around 500 circuits listed, many are minor variations on the same circuit. For example, there are five switches, press switch, slide switch, reed switch, touch plate and vibrating switches. In several cases the circuit is shown with each switch as a separate experiment expos 27-37 are effectively the same and so on. Although I haven't counted I would suspect there are less than 100 different things to try.Secondly, the major components are not identified. Items 21-23 are sound effect ICs, but they are hidden inside opaque plastic blocks, we don't know what they are or even the pinouts - you couldn't use this set to explore a circuit and then make it up from real components; it's all just boxes, one plays sounds, one an alarm one music. Equally, building a radio consists of linking an anonymous radio block to a speaker. You won't learn much there either.Finally the multimeter is a a very cheap item and didn't work in the set I received; the oscilloscope is a software program that only measures audio signal - and has potential for inadvertent damage to the PC that you run it on.

Great product - loads of different possibilitiesBought it for my 10 year old he was really impressed.We did have to purchase some more fuses as the first one blew and was down to one but they only cost me £1 for 5