We’re pleased to announce that we now have two books available in our store and for today only for you Sunday makers who are reading our site you can get 10% off either (or both) books. Just use the code “book10″ (no quotes) on checkout and 10% off these great Arduino and Electronics books. The 10% off deal is for today, Sunday 1/31/2010 only.
Practical Arduino (Jon Oxer & Hugh Blemings) – 1st print
This book is best used for people who’ve gone through our tutorials and want more! Please note that the book does not come with any electronic parts or hardware. You’ll probably want an Arduino starter pack or similar so that you have the Arduino, USB cable, power adapter, wires, and a protoshield. Read more…
Make: Electronics (Charles Platt) – 1st print
We checked out this book before putting it in the shop, its geared towards ultimate-beginners and teaches electronics starting from basic core of analog to some digital to microcontrollers. You’ll learn tools, prototyping soldering techniques, transistors, 555’s, etc. while completing useful projects. A nice and tidy intro! This book is a good accompaniment to learning microcontrollers/Arduino in that it fills the necessary electronics theory and background. Read more…
What a wild day for open source hardware and for small businesses, check out this report from Inuit (they make QuickBooks, we use it)… It’s called the “Intuit Future of Small Business Report – Hobbypreneurs”. They outline the maker movement and talk about companies like ours…
Today’s passion-driven hobbyists are tomorrow’s entrepreneurs – otherwise known as hobbypreneurs, who successfully combine their passion for a particular hobby or craft with pragmatic business smarts to create new revenue streams for themselves and their families. Intuit today released the latest findings from the Intuit Future of Small Business Report series, written by Emergent Research, that focus on the “Maker” movement and the reasons that hobbypreneurs mean business. The report includes perspectives and data from a recent Maker Faire, where hobbyists identified their motives and reasons for starting their own small business.
Here’s a direct link to the PDF. Intuit, you should really set up a booth at Maker Faire and/or do a session on book keeping using QuickBooks, folks would love it.
We are working on a Creative Common’d coloring book for “kids” (similar to Citizen Engineer volume 01) – the title for now is “Ladyada’s e is for electronics” – here is a list of words, one for each letter – if you can think of a better one or additional one for any letter let us know. Any suggestions you have would be helpful.
You can post your suggestions in the comments or stop by our weekly “Ask an engineer chat” Saturday night, 10pm ET 10/10/2009 (additional details below).
a – amperes
b – battery / breadboard
c – capacitor
d – diode
e – electronics
f – fpga/frequency/fet
g – ground
h – hertz
i – current/infrared/inductor
j – joule
k – kelvin
l – led
m – motor/microcontroller/multimeter/mos/mosfet the cat
n – noise/npn
o – ohm/oscilloscope/opamp
p – potentiometer/pcb
q – quartz / quantum field effect transistor
r – resistor/relay
s – switch/silcon/soldering iron
t – transistor
u – ultraviolet/usb/uart
v – voltage
w – wire/watt
x – xtal
y – yagi antenna
z – zener
Chat details!
Visit our new “chat” section on Adafruit at 10pm ET – 9/26/2009
“The Manga Guide to Electricity”, part of “The Manga Guide” series by No Starch Press, is a novel approach to the old problem of getting over the initial mental block when trying to learn electronics.
We decided to compare this book to another introductory text: “Getting Started in Electronics” by [Forrest M. Mims]. [Mims]‘ book is a handwritten masterpiece of electronic literature. The writing style is friendly and concise, the examples are simple, and the drawings are excellent. It also makes sure to keep the learning process as application based as possible. Unlike other books, it doesn’t bog the reader down with math and theory that is only useful to advanced students. Since its original printing in 1983, [Mims]‘ has become the de facto standard for beginner electronic literature.
“The Manga Guide” attempts to walk the beginner through the very basics of electronics using the interactions between [Rereko], a resident of planet Electopia; [Yonosuke], a transdimensional robot cell phone; and [Hikaru Yano Sensei], an electrical engineering researcher at a Japanese university. [Rereko] is apparently very bad at electricity, and is sent to learn the basics from Hikaru over the summer by her professor.
“The Manga Guide” is a lot of fun to read. The interactions between the characters are lighthearted, and the whole setting has a sort of quirkiness about it that makes you keep reading just for the joy of it. It covers most of the basics thoroughly and with excellent examples. The art is a very well drawn, playful style of manga.
Open Softwear is the latest project at 1scale1. It is a free book (CC-NC-SA-2.5) introducing basic concepts about microcontroller programming through Arduino, and using it in when crafting interactive garments. The softwear book project is open and looks for collaborators to help with proofreading, adding new examples, translating it to other languages, or photographing your own projects for the printed version to come.
Our video Citizen Engineer volume 01 is now a comic book/zine! Volume 01 of Citizen Engineer is available as a limited edition full color 32 page comic “SIM CARD HACKING” – the comic also comes with a SIM card reader kit! We print, trim and assemble each one on demand and they look amazing! We are doing a limited run of these, get the first printing at Adafruit Industries.
Citizen Engineer volume 01 – SIM CARD HACKING comic is CC attribution-share alike 3.0. You are encouraged to share it and also print your own, if you’d like to support Citizen Engineer and future videos/comics get a comic/kit!
