Getting Started in Electronic – by Forrest M. Mims, III. is a complete electronics course in 128 pages! This famous electronics inventor teaches you the basics, takes you on a tour of analog and digital components, explains how they work, and shows how they are combined for various applications. Includes circuit assembly tips and 100 electronic circuits you can build and test. Forrest has written dozens of books, hundreds of articles, invented scientific measurement devices for NASA, and loves to share his knowledge with eager students! This is a “must have” for the library of anyone interested in learning the basics of electronic theory and principals.
Begin With the Basics – Learn about static electricity and how to make magnets and solenoids. Find out about direct current and alternating current. Then learn about electrical circuits that use batteries and lamps.
Basic Electronic Components – Find out how switches, relays, meters, resistor, capacitors, transformers are used.
Diodes and Transistors – These components are they key ingredients to modern electronic circuits. Find out what they do and how they work.
Integrated Circuits – From dozens to many thousands of electronic components can be formed on tiny chips of silicon.
Digital Integrated Circuits – Learn the basics about digital logic gates using switches and transformers.
Linear Integrated Circuits – Linear circuits respond to only the presence or absences of voltage. Linear circuits respond to a wide range of voltages giving them many applications.
Circuit Assembly Tips – Learn how to use electronic components to make temporary circuits and permanent circuits using wire and solder.
100 Electronic Circuits – Now you’re ready to build any or even all of the 100 tested and working circuits included in the book. The categories of circuits include basic, photonic, digital, and linear.
NEW PRODUCT – Conductive Silver Ink Pen – Standard Tip. Experiment with paper electronics with this silver conductive ink pen that will let you draw traces! We like the make of this pen, it has a nice liquid silver ink that flows easily, and it works great. In just 3 minutes from opening the packaging, we made the image above, a coin cell holder with an LED.
There are two ‘tips’ available – standard and micro. The microtip allows for finer control but is a little harder to use (because it doesn’t deposit as much silver at once). See the image above with a demonstration of the kind of traces you can draw with each of the lines.
NEW PRODUCT – Conductive Silver Ink Pen – Micro Tip. Experiment with paper electronics with this silver conductive ink pen that will let you draw traces! We like the make of this pen, it has a nice liquid silver ink that flows easily, and it works great. In just 3 minutes from opening the packaging, we made the image above, a coin cell holder with an LED.
There are two ‘tips’ available – standard and micro. The microtip allows for finer control but is a little harder to use (because it doesn’t deposit as much silver at once). See the image above with a demonstration of the kind of traces you can draw with each of the lines.
NEW PRODUCT – Beagle Bone v1.0. New from the fine people who have brought us the Beagle Board, we now have a smaller, lighter, but powerful single board linux computer, Beagle Bone! We like this move to a more compact and integrated SBC. For example, there is onboard Ethernet and USB host, as well as a USB client interface (a FTDI chip for shell access). It even comes preloaded with Angstrom Linux on the 2GB microSD card, all you need is a 5V adapter and a mini-B cable and you’re ready to rock!
We are currently allowing sign ups for the ‘Bone, but not backorders. We expect to have these in hand in late November. Sign up to get an email the moment we have these in stock!
At over 1.5 billion Dhrystone operations per second and vector floating point arithmetic operations, the BeagleBone is capable of not just interfacing to all of your robotics motor drivers, location or pressure sensors and 2D or 3D cameras, but also running OpenCV, OpenNI and other image collection and analysis software to recognize the objects around your robot and the gestures you might make to control it. Through HDMI, VGA or LCD expansion boards, it is capable of decoding and displaying mutliple video formats utilizing a completely open source software stack and synchronizing playback over Ethernet or USB with other BeagleBoards to create massive video walls. If what you are into is building 3D printers, then the BeagleBone has the extensive PWM capabilities, the on-chip Ethernet and the 3D rendering and manipulation capabilities all help you eliminate both your underpowered microcontroller-based controller board as well as that PC from your basement.
Board size: 3.4″ x 2.1″
Shipped with 2GB microSD card with the Angstrom Distribution with node.js and Cloud9 IDE
Single cable development environment with built-in FTDI-based serial/JTAG and on-board hub to give the same cable simultaneous access to a USB device port on the target processor
Industry standard 3.3V I/Os on the expansion headers with easy-to-use 0.1″ spacing
On-chip Ethernet, not off of USB
256MB of DDR2
700-MHz super-scalar ARM Cortex™-A8
Easier to clone thanks to larger pitch on BGA devices (0.8mm vs. 0.4mm), no package-on-package memories, standard DDR2 vs. LPDDR, integrated USB PHYs and more.
NEW PRODUCT – Analog 2-axis Thumb Joystick with Select Button + Breakout Board. This mini-kit makes it easy to mount a PSP/Xbox-like thumb joystick to your project. The thumbstick is an analog joystick – more accurate and sensitive than just ‘directional’ joysticks – with a ‘press in to select’ button. Since it’s analog, you’ll need to analog reading pins on your microcontroller to determine X and Y. Having an extra digital input will let you read the switch.
The pack comes in three parts – the joystick itself, a soft-touch rubber ‘hat’ and a nicely designed breakout board. We designed the breakout so that you can attach the joystick to a panel easily – every other breakout we wanted to carry had the mounting holes so they were in the way of the joystick movement! A 5 pin 0.1″ spaced header makes it easy to connect either in a perfboard/breadboard setting or free wiring. You’ll need to solder the joystick into the PCB using a soldering iron and solder, but its very simple and will only take a minute.
GE Color Effects hacking! At this rate, I need to buy a few more Arduinos.
As a last-minute Halloween decoration, I added 25 pairs of blinking eyes to the bushes in front of our house by using a string of GE Color Effects lights being driven by an Arduino Uno. The whole thing took about half a day, including a lesson about both needing to mark fried microcontrollers and the raw hubris of gluing shut enclosures before testing the components.
The entire implementation took half a day, with the hardest part being that I didn’t realize the first Arduino I grabbed was fried from an accident a couple months ago (it’s now marked by bending the headers to make it look like a dead bug).
I was a little skeptical when I first started work on the code, but within half an hour, the state machine for the eyes and population-control really came together!
Also, I used the clips that come with the lights to mount them in 25 pairs. They worked out surprisingly well.
Now, will the whole thing withstand lasting into the dead of winter…
Get ready for the latest open source development platform that easily enables incredible inventions like wirelessly networked autonomous robots, self-teaching electronics education kits, intelligent digital signage, flexible retro-gaming devices, home automation and much more. BeagleBoard.org is pleased to introduce the newest member of its wildly popular pack — the BeagleBone. Three years ago, BeagleBoard blurred the lines between desktop and embedded computing, paving the way for rapidly accelerated open source innovation on ARM® processors. At $89, the new BeagleBone development board, based on a Texas Instruments (TI) Sitara™ AM335x ARM Cortex™-A8 microprocessor, features the best open source development value for hobbyists, developers and engineers. It delivers bare bones hardware with access to interface signals for sensors and controls, while eliminating the need for additional equipment with a single cable development environment.
“It’s exciting to see BeagleBoard.org developers release more amazing open-source hardware for the community to use and share,” said Limor Fried, engineer, Adafruit Industries. “BeagleBoard, and now the BeagleBone, are fantastic platforms for any open-source hardware developer to learn from and build upon.”
Easy and extensive hardware, connectivity with Linux and access to open source community
Developing projects with sensors and controls on the BeagleBone is easy with the flexible Linux kernel that reduces complication of learning input/output (I/O) through the use of existing drivers and interface applications. BeagleBone runs full-featured Linux, including native scripting and compilation tools. It also provides on-chip Ethernet–MAC, USB with PHY and A/D converters, along with countless other peripherals, to minimize the number of extraneous components needed and further simplify design. BeagleBone can be used as a stand-alone development board or as an add-on to the existing BeagleBoard, BeagleBoard-xM or desktop computer to attach thousands of readily available sensors and peripherals. Featuring more than 60 configurable industry-standard 3.3 Volt I/Os, enabling five serial ports, two I2C buses, timers, power management modules, SPI and more, BeagleBone provides easy connectivity to additional peripherals for greater design flexibility. Developers also have access to the open source community, which provides a large number of I/O references to help with programming. Continual support is also available through BeagleBoard.org, one of the most active open source hardware communities today.
“As an open source developer, I’m always looking for the latest and greatest open platform to run my embedded applications,” said Robert Nelson, application engineer, Digi-Key Design Support. “With the BeagleBone, I’ll be able to run the same, full Linux OS as my development PC but on the perfect low-power ARM microprocessor – and in a small embedded form factor with all the I/O my next application needs.”
Start development in five minutes with a single cable and 10-second boot!
Innovators don’t have to wait long to begin their latest creation. BeagleBone simplifies hardware and software set up for the board, allowing developers to get started in five minutes with the pre-installed Angstrom Distribution and node.js with Cloud9 IDE. Using a single USB cable, developers can power their board and point the Web browser to the board for friendly development and compatibility with Windows, Mac and Linux. The integrated USB hub further enables additional, simultaneous low-level serial console and widely supported JTAG hardware debug connections, including TI’s Code Composer Studio™integrated development environment (IDE). Starting public beta development now, on-board example libraries are available for education and rapid prototyping to further speed development.
“We’re big fans of embedded systems at our office and think Cloud9 IDE for BeagleBone is an amazing use case. It makes writing code for your device as easy as plugging in and connecting to a port with a browser,” said Rik Arends, chief technology officer, Cloud9 IDE. “We’re looking towards supporting embedded development from the cloud in the future. This way, our users will have all the benefits of keeping code safely online, with the ability to easily distribute to multiple devices.”
PixelController is a real time video/VJ generator and mixer software. Most of the Visuals are generated and mixed in realtime and respond to the environment. I use PixelController to control my PixelInvaders Panels.
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