Roland Corporation is a Japanese multinational manufacturer of electronic musical instruments, electronic equipment, and software. It was founded by Ikutaro Kakehashi in Osaka on 18 April 1972. In 2005, its headquarters relocated to Hamamatsu in Shizuoka Prefecture. It has factories in Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. As of December 2022, it employed 2,783 people. In 2014, it was subject to a management buyout by its CEO, Junichi Miki, supported by Taiyo Pacific Partners.
Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American semiconductor company headquartered in Dallas, Texas that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits. It is one of the top 10 semiconductor companies worldwide based on sales volume. The company's focus is on developing analog chips and embedded processors, which account for more than 80% of its revenue. TI also produces TI digital light processing technology and education technology products including calculators, microcontrollers, and multi-core processors. The company holds 45,000 patents worldwide as of 2016.
Radio-controlled cars, or RC cars for short, are miniature model cars, vans, buses, trucks or buggies that can be controlled from a distance using a specialized transmitter or remote. The term "RC" has been used to mean both "remote controlled" and "radio controlled". "Remote controlled" includes vehicles that are controlled by radio waves, infrared waves or a physical wire connection. RC cars are powered by one of the three energy sources—electricity, nitro fuel or petrol. Electric RC models are powered by small but powerful electric motors and rechargeable nickel-cadmium (Ni-Cd), nickel metal hydride(NiMH), or lithium polymer (LiPo) cells with the former two being the most used. Both NiMH and LiPo have advantages and disadvantages in various RC applications where NiMH is mainly used for recreational and LiPo for more demanding purposes. There are also brushed or brushless electric motors—brushless motors are more powerful, long lasting and efficient, but also much more expensive than brushed motors.
Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company, engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It is considered one of the Big Five American technology companies; the other four are Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
Lego Mindstorms is a discontinued line of educational kits for building programmable robots based on Lego bricks.
Tiger Electronics Ltd. is an American toy manufacturer best known for its handheld electronic games, the Furby, the Talkboy, Giga Pets, the 2-XL robot, and audio games such as Brain Warp and the Brain Shift. When it was an independent company, Tiger Electronics Inc., its headquarters were in Vernon Hills, Illinois. It has been a subsidiary of Hasbro since 1998.
LeapFrog Enterprises, Inc. is an educational entertainment and electronics company based in Emeryville, California. LeapFrog designs, develops, and markets technology-based learning products and related content for the education of children from infancy through grade school. The company was founded by Michael Wood and Robert Lally in 1994. John Barbour is the chief executive officer of LeapFrog.
The Speak & Spell line is a series of electronic hand-held child computers by Texas Instruments that consisted of a TMC0280 linear predictive coding speech synthesizer, a keyboard, and a receptor slot to receive one of a collection of ROM game library modules. The first Speak & Spell was introduced at the summer Consumer Electronics Show in June 1978, making it one of the earliest handheld electronic devices with a visual display to use interchangeable game cartridges. The company Basic Fun brought back the classic Speak & Spell in 2019 with some minor changes.
Heathkit is the brand name of kits and other electronic products produced and marketed by the Heath Company. The products over the decades have included electronic test equipment, high fidelity home audio equipment, television receivers, amateur radio equipment, robots, electronic ignition conversion modules for early model cars with point style ignitions, and the influential Heath H-8, H-89, and H-11 hobbyist computers, which were sold in kit form for assembly by the purchaser.
A denshi block is a small plastic box containing an electronic component. The blocks are used in some educational electronics kits, such as the Gakken EX-150, to allow experiments to be performed easily and safely.
The Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab is a toy lab set designed to allow children to create and watch nuclear and chemical reactions using radioactive material. The Atomic Energy Lab was released by the A. C. Gilbert Company in 1950.
Merchandise for the Thomas & Friends franchise has been produced to capitalize on the success of the television series Thomas & Friends. Whilst merchandise was produced alongside due to the popularity of the first of The Railway Series by the Rev. W. Awdry since 1945, and the original broadcast of the television series in 1984 in the United Kingdom, large numbers of manufacturers have sought to produce Thomas-branded items after the television series was broadcast in the United States and Japan.
Wooden toy trains are toy trains that run on a wooden track system with grooves to guide the wheels of the rolling stock. While the trains, tracks and scenery accessories are made mainly of wood, the engines and cars connect to each other using metal hooks or small magnets, and some use plastic wheels mounted on metal axles. Some trains are made to resemble anthropomorphical, fictional, and prototypical railroad equipment.
Fisher-Price, Inc. is an American company that produces educational toys for infants, toddlers and preschoolers, headquartered in East Aurora, New York. The company was founded in 1930 during the Great Depression by Herman Fisher, Irving Price, Helen Schelle, and Margaret Evans Price.
Educational toys are objects of play, generally designed for children, which are expected to stimulate learning. They are often intended to meet an educational purpose such as helping a child develop a particular skill or teaching a child about a particular subject. They often simplify, miniaturize, or even model activities and objects used by adults.
The American children's television series Sesame Street is known for its extensive merchandising. Licensees include a variety of companies which manufacture books, magazines, video/audio media, and toys using the characters and themes of Sesame Street.
American Girl is a series of video games developed by various studios and distributed by American Girl.
Adafruit Industries is an open-source hardware company based in New York, United States. It was founded by Limor Fried in 2005. The company designs, manufactures and sells electronics products, electronics components, tools, and accessories. It also produces learning resources, including live and recorded videos about electronics, technology, and programming.
Kasey the Kinderbot is an educational toy learning system designed, developed, and sold by Fisher-Price, a wholly owned division of the Mattel Corporation, nominated for the Educational Toy of the Year award in 2002. Because of its strong commercial sales, Kasey was reported as an important item in the balance sheet of Fisher-Price.
The littleBits Synth Kit is an analogue modular synthesiser developed by the American electronics startup littleBits in collaboration with the Japanese music technology company Korg. Released in late 2013 after a design process of around nine months, the kit features 12 small modules that can be connected to form larger circuits. Several of these bits are adapted from circuits used in Korg's Monotron synthesisers. A booklet detailing over 10 example projects to follow is sold with the kit. A later version of the Synth Kit, the Synth Pro Kit, was released in June 2015 and added three new bits that provide external connectivity for the kit.
