Braun GmbH, formerly Braun AG, is a German consumer products company based in Kronberg, Germany. From the mid-1950s, the Braun brand was closely linked with the concept of German modern industrial design and its combination of functionality and technology. In 1956, Braun created its first design department, headed by Dr. Fritz Eichler, who instituted a collaboration with the Ulm School of Design to develop a new product line.
Amazing pieces of industrial design that still today remain fresh, true classics that have survived the test of time.
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By coincidence I just visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where they have an exhibit up right now of the work of Dieter Rams, who was one of the principal designers for Braun. The exhibition runs through February 20, and is well worth seeing.
Wow, I learned electronics on those Lectron magnetic blocks! They were marketed in the US by Raytheon for a while. The company is still around – http://www.lectron.de/ – the site is in German, natürlich.
I got my hands on some blocks from the Lectron kit (the second photo in your post). The ones I got were the repackaged Raytheon-branded version of the kit, but they were the same ones (“Made in West Germany”):
Yup… I had these when I was a kid. I can still remember the metal baseboard that the blocks stuck to (a true ground plane!) and being quite devastated when my dog chewed up one of the transistor blocks. Wouldn’t something equivalent to this for working with the Arduino be really cool??? Blocks for LEDs (with current limiting resistors built in), switches (pull up and pull down varieties), current control transistors and such for different inputs and outputs? Hmm… may just have to give that a try…
By coincidence I just visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where they have an exhibit up right now of the work of Dieter Rams, who was one of the principal designers for Braun. The exhibition runs through February 20, and is well worth seeing.
Wow, I learned electronics on those Lectron magnetic blocks! They were marketed in the US by Raytheon for a while. The company is still around – http://www.lectron.de/ – the site is in German, natürlich.
I got my hands on some blocks from the Lectron kit (the second photo in your post). The ones I got were the repackaged Raytheon-branded version of the kit, but they were the same ones (“Made in West Germany”):
https://plus.google.com/112403562981201111940/posts/V4FbyZhigHs
Yup… I had these when I was a kid. I can still remember the metal baseboard that the blocks stuck to (a true ground plane!) and being quite devastated when my dog chewed up one of the transistor blocks. Wouldn’t something equivalent to this for working with the Arduino be really cool??? Blocks for LEDs (with current limiting resistors built in), switches (pull up and pull down varieties), current control transistors and such for different inputs and outputs? Hmm… may just have to give that a try…