THE BLOG
DEV LOG · HOW THE KIT WORKS · THE HISTORY BEHIND THE CAMPAIGNSDev log, how the kit works, and the history behind the campaigns.
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Meet Teddy Ruiz, who came in the back door to borrow a vice and never went home
The last of seven. Teddy sweeps up, fixes bikes out the back, and says try it and see before anybody has finished asking. Nothing happening is his favourite part, because nothing happening means something is loose.
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Meet June Marchetti, who minds the front table on Saturday mornings
Part six of seven. Sal's daughter grew up in the back of the shop watching the little kids' table, and then one Saturday her father pulled a stool over. She is the one who will let a six-year-old hold a part.
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Meet Nate Pruitt, which is me, so I asked myself the same six questions
Part five of seven. I write these posts, so this week I wrote the questions down and answered them at my own kitchen table. A two-transistor blinker at nine, forty years of not looking, and a Saturday morning I handed the lid to somebody else.
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Meet Vera Holcomb, who pushed four desks together and got a club out of it
Part four of seven. Two pupils stayed behind in 1978 to ask why the lamp got hot enough to burn a finger. She had no budget and no period to answer in, so she bought a kit with her own money and made a room.
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Meet Emmett Crane, who ran the Bijou on weeknights and the creature feature on Fridays
Part three of seven. A projectionist who stayed for the wiring rather than the films, a cape, two coffins, a fog machine that was really a kettle, and the night the prop on the set turned out to be plugged in.
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Meet Sal Marchetti, who has been behind the same counter since the shop opened
Part two of seven. Sal answered a card in the window, arrived knowing none of it, and taught himself out of the first booklet — which is still under the counter, and which he will still hand you before he hands you an opinion.
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Meet Ray Kessler, who fixed televisions here for thirty-one years
The first of seven interviews with the people of Ohmsville. Ray came out of the shop at nine with a box he could not carry, stayed for three decades of picture tubes and tape machines, and still has the manual with his pencil marks on project forty-one.
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The computer on the counter
Page three of Ray Kessler's service notebook, and the only one with nothing to repair in it. A sealed beige machine at the big-box store in 1984, a boy who pressed one key, and a mark that stayed on the screen after he let go.
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Six Halloween circuits from the spring terminal
A candle that never sits still, eyes that blink the opposite way round, a lightning burst with a rattle, a door that groans itself shut, a tripwire that screams, and a ghost that remembers you crossed the room.
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The cabinet at opening time
Page two of Ray Kessler's service notebook. A driving cabinet that would not wake on a Saturday morning in 1984, a blown fuse that was not the fault, and a picture that came back crooked and stayed that way.
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The portraits on the wall
Page one of Ray Kessler's service notebook. A shop in 1978, a kit on a plywood stand, and a lamp that went out while a thirteen-year-old watched somebody find out why.
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RadioShack used to sell kids this madness
The Modern Rogue dug the old Science Fair kits out of the closet and put them on camera. If you want to know what Ohmsville is recreating, start here.
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The kit has a name: Ohmsville
Circuit City was a placeholder and someone else's trademark. The lab is called Ohmsville now, the board is called the Spring Terminal, and everything lives at ohmsville.com.
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Why the tone dies in the dark
Experiment 5 swaps a resistor for a photocell and the pitch follows the light. Cover the cell and the tone stops. Here is what starves.
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Ohmsville is live
The early-80s spring-terminal electronics lab, running in your browser. Here is what is in the box, who is teaching, and how the shelf is stacked.