Get your ohmmeters out, kids. It’s time for part 2 of how to use a multimeter, this time for all of your resistor-measuring needs.

You will Learn:

• How to measure resistors (duh)
• The difference between auto-ranging and ranged meters and what to watch out for
• How to characterize and test potentiometers and certain sensors.

I also attempt to uncover the reason why all meter ranges start with the number 2.

Click here to read the tutorial!

There’s lots of video clips, many of which are extremely boring compared to YouTube. Like check this one out of me shading an LDR

I strongly recommend adding it to your myspace!@

See the screenshot below, then go and visit the Real Deal

Thanks to the ease of going into business, and the increasing demand for DIY kits, this is a great time for people to get involved in kit making. I’m starting to collect resources for kit-makers, including a list of existing kit-makers as well as hints and tricks I’ve learned from running Adafruit Industries

These two articles (Kitmakers and Kitmaking) cover things from how to deal with shipping & handling, to designing PCBs, to documentation and customer support. Check them out and make suggestions!

There are a lot of great providers out there (I use Laughing Squid and highly recommend it) but even LS’s ‘largest’ package is too small for ladyada.net… What to do? Easy: Host all that bulky content at S3, then use mod_rewrite to reroute it over to S3. (You could also do it with php, asp or similar for higher ’security’ but mod_rewrite is lighter and good enough for me)

For example, this image has the url reference “http://www.ladyada.net/images/mintyboost/assemblyv12/inductorusbplace_t.jpg” but if you access that url in your browser, it is automatically rewritten by apache to http://s3.amazonaws.com/ladyadanet_mintyboost/assemblyv12/inductorusbplace_t.jpg

(same with my research pdf, a big pdf that easily accounted for 500M a day of traffic at its peak! http://www.ladyada.net/media/common/thesis.pdf -> http://s3.amazonaws.com/ladyadanet_common/thesis.pdf , S3 doesn’t care what the data is or how its encoded)

Of course mod_rewrite is not necessary, you can always just directly reference s3.amazonaws.com but that makes it harder to move the content around if you decide to eventually go with another service (or if s3 goes away one day!)

OK so, what’s the point and what does this have to do with electronics, eh? Well one of the killer apps of open source and public domain electronics is documentation. That means media. And media storage, backup and transfer is extremely expensive for the everyday person. It becomes increasingly difficult to host a project when one digg-storm or slashdotting makes that ‘free’ webpage account go down.

Edit: I use the Firefox S3 plugin to upload and set the access control on my files.

Are you using S3 or something similar for your projects, kits or documentation? Leave a comment or email! Its always interesting to see what other people are doing in this space.

So now that you have a fun kit from one of the many reputable electronic kit makers, you are wondering “what soldering iron should I get?”

A fine question, grasshopper! And one that I can easily answer…I have researched three “kits” of tools for amateur electronics hobbyists: The $60 basic kit, $115 better kit, and the $275 best kit.

Mix & Match soldering irons, multimeters and wire cutters to get the set that fits you best.

Click “Read the rest…” to see the full “basic kit” as of this moment (it won’t be updated so be sure to bookmark http://www.ladyada.net/library/equipt-kits.html instead )

Here is the “basic” kit, a $60 investment in tools that you can use no matter how good you get (the soldering iron is the only tool that you will eventually replace if you want to get serious about tinkering with electronics.

	"25W adjustable" soldering iron (marginal quality)	Xyltronics SUPERPASE 258VL Jameco 116572 $16.95	Datasheet Do not get "cold heat" or other butane irons: they are not suitable!
	Combination "3rd hand" and soldering iron holder	Jameco 681002 8.75	You can either get a third hand tool and, seperately, a sponge/iron holder but this device is pretty functional and is a bit cheaper.
	60/40 Lead Solder, rosin core .031” 1/2 lb	Jameco 141794 $5.95	This is a good general purpose solder. Also look into getting 63/37 solder. Getting a 1 lb roll is only $0.75 more so consider it if you plan on doing a bunch of soldering! Don’t buy silver solder (yet) or lead-free solder. You will have a lot of difficulty using it and its not ‘less dangerous’
	Solder sucker / Desolder pump	Jameco 19166 $4.95	Extremely useful for when you make mistakes or bridge pins!
	Shear cutters	Cooper Tools "Xcelite" 170M Jameco 146712 $5.75	Essential, these are fairly inexpensive and high quality. Don’t ever use these to cut anything but copper wire (electronic leads). Steel wire, or aluminum will basically destroy them instantaneously!
	Basic Multimeter	MASTECH M300 Jameco 220812 $9.79	This is the cheapest meter that Jameco carries that has continuity testing, a necessary function. However, it’s a very limited meter.
	Wire strippers	Jameco 78992 $3.95	This is the defacto standard issued to all students. But hey, they work!
Total		$56

In this case, exactly 35 Watts of power!

Check out the new Laser Information pages for all of your $20K laser cutter setup needs!

Its another Wiki embedded page: it looks like a normal web page but if you click the link at the top it will take you to the Wiki where the data is kept. That way, the 99% of people who just want the info don’t have to deal with the strange look of a wiki.

I’ve decided to experiment with the Wiki architecture for dynamic/collaborative documentation. For my kits and projects, wiki’s make less sense than forums, but a lot of people email me with resources so the “parts procurement” page that has been so popular that I’ve turned it into embedded content.

Now when you have a suggestion for a company to sample from, you can just edit the wiki yourself!

It seems to search the store, blog, forums and all content: hooray!