I imagine my interest in electronics started because my one grandfather had an electronics repair shop, and my other grandfather liked electronics as a hobby.

So this is the 30 in 1 thing that I started my interest with:

http://www.apogeekits.com/lab_kit_el301.htm

Sometime later, I got this one:

http://www.ramseyelectronics.com/cgi-bin/commerce.exe?preadd=action&key=PL130

The only thing is that you need to closely follow the book. My “experimenting” would quickly resulted in damaged components. The components could be replaced, but it’s a bit of a pain.

The internet has all kinds of schematics for various circuits. It also has some info on typical TV failures. Sony’s manufacturing is so precise, that when there is a bad solder location which opens over time, it often occurs in all of the TV’s of that model they produce. That’s the extent of my tv repair success. Well I did repair a tv for my in-laws, but there was physical damage to a connector on the back and I was able to identify and fix with a little solder.

I’ve only ever bought one kit to put together, a 300 watt amplifier. The instructions had a bunch of “addendums”, one fortune cookie size pieces of paper thrown in the box. That was a bit tricky but works well.

I’ve only really ever designed two circuits, one controls a stoplight in my basement in a realistic way and one is the camera timer (actually two different working versions).

And one other neat thing I’ve done is salvaged a viewfinder from an old video camera so that I can power it from batteries and input a video signal. The camera had an lcd screen, but I never got that to a working state.

My current interest is in PICs. Programmable integrated circuit. It is essentially a computer on a single chip. It can sense a number of inputs (switches, sensors, etc) perform some logic, store or recall memory, and set some outputs high or low (and repeat). Some even have usb interface built in for communicating with a computer.

There’s got to be some other random things I’ve repaired, but don’t come to mind now. Usually broken solder joints at connectors.

That pretty much sums things up. For some reason, I also collect a lot of junk…