We decided to take a day out from the robots and build a super-cool “Ice Tube Clock Kit” from Adafruit. The kit came as several hundred little capacitors, transistors, microchips, and other components, which Genevieve soldered one by one into a little circuit board. I was “chief supervisor” (which means I did nothing but watch) while Genevieve did all the work to put this thing together. Here is an example of some of the individual components we started with:

The coolest part of this little clock is the retro, 1970-vintage Russian vacuum tube that displays the numbers. You can just imagine this old vacuum tube being pulled out of some Russian submarine:

This next picture provides a close up of the circuit board and components that Genevieve soldered together:

We loved building this kit! It took us one good day of work, with plenty of breaks throughout the day, and it was great fun. These kits can be purchased from www.adafruit.com here.