50 years ago, Hot Wheels made its first set of miniature automobile toys, using a die-cast outer body. Starting with outlandish designs and making it their signature (before building a few existing car designs too), Hot Wheels have come a long way, enchanting children for half a century, myself included. When you chart the evolution of Hot Wheels cars, you don’t notice the same trends as those of automobiles. You notice qualities that are much more aspirational to a different user base, so Hot Wheels’ trend chart’s always been to do incredibly cool things that entice children as well as the inner child in adults.
Hot Wheels have done a lot of things in the past 50 years. They’ve made modded cars, pandered to movie franchises and pop cultures, made some incredible adrenaline-filled race-tracks and theme sets, made Hot Wheels DIY kits, outlandish cars inspired by outlandish creatures, cars with bottle-openers integrated into the spoiler, cars that change color based on temperature, and even a Hot Wheels GoPro mount… and when you see how far they’ve come in the past 50 years, it’s truly worth admiring.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
