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For pic programming, I was very pleased with this USB kit. http://www.electronickits.com/kit/complete/prog/ck1708.htm It looks like they sell similar assembled units now. http://www.electronickits.com/kit/complete/prog/ck1710.htm

For pic programming, I was very pleased with this USB kit. http://www.electronickits.com/kit/complete/prog/ck1708.htm It looks like they sell similar assembled units now. http://www.electronickits.com/kit/complete/prog/ck1710.htm

Look stuff up and get a background.

Like speakers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudspeaker

Ton of information and background on how it all works.

Get a home electronics kit and play around

http://www.electronickits.com/kit/complete/science/mx908.htm

They sure do, but they're much nicer now. My 9- and 8-year-old kids get the kit out, unprompted, to build stuff pretty often.

Sorry got the above link slightly wrong - I accidentally added a trailing slash.
here it is again:
http://www.electronickits.com/kit/complete/radi/ck301.htm

I had a similar problem of how to get sound from my PC to everywhere in the house.
Simplest Solution: an FM Stereo transmitter.

Here's one place you can get an FM transmitter kit.
http://www.electronickits.com/kit/complete/radi/ck301.htm/

I made my FM transmitter from a kit (not this one - unfortunately the kit I used isn't sold from the place I bought it any more) because I just like doing that sort of thing, but you can buy them pre-made too.
Total cost: About $40
Range of the device: About 30 meters.

That way any stereo in your house can pick it up, no wires needed.
If your amp doesnt have an FM receiver you can of course pick one up pretty cheaply - even a cheapo FM receiver which sounds terrible will sound good once you have it playing through proper speakers instead of the litte 4" speaker in the receiver.

Sound wont be as perfect as it would be connected directly to your stereo, with just the one stereo playing, but if you have multiple sound sources playing the same thing from different parts of your house they are going to be interfering with each other and distorting the sound anyway due to reflections and different levels of attenuation of the treble or bass cause by walls between ajacent rooms etc.

The FM transmitters you get for your iPod is much weaker and only has a range of a few feet, but the kit form transmitters seem to have about a 30 foot range.
I can pretty much receive the signal anywhere in my house, but not much further than my boundary, so there is little problem with causing interference. Of course you tune the transmitter into a blank spot in the FM band too.

Best of all - you can have a "silent disco" house party or whatever - everyone just brings their own FM receiver/ipod or whatever and can crank the music as loud as they want, with just low level sound playing over the house system. If you use Linux, you can even hack an old broken USB headset, (I have a couple of broken USB headsets from where I have stood up and walked away from my PC with the things still on my head) and basically create a USB interface for your FM transmitter - just snip off the broken headphones, and connect the wires that were for the headphones to the input of the FM transmitter. That way you can route just the sound from your media player to the radio (mabey have a bit of script or somethign to start the player with the appropriate parameters), and leave all other system sounds playing through the PC speakers.

Use one of the many remote PC music player programs to enable you to switch selection - eg. there's a program to control winamp from a PDA. I am sure if you are halfway technically competent you should be able to easily put something together to control what your PC is playing - through a program you write for your phone, to mabey an IR receiver and a bit of script and an old remote control or something like that.

I woudl imagine with cost being the driving factor you are very limited. As most modern circuits would require a resonable power supply, ocilloscope, plus components. This being said since you sound like you already have computers look into getting a simulation program that will allow you to build circuits virtually and test them. just a though.

(random google search)
http://www.electronickits.com/kit/complete/kita/ck800.htm

Well why don't you ask carl ?
idiot

As much as I like ThinkGeek, their selection is limited to gadgets. I found that assembling and -- to my parents dismay -- disassembling things are what really grabbed my interest.

I would take a look at the various kits from American Science & Surplus. There are a number of other sites (e.g., Carl's Electronics) which have even more kits, but I haven't ordered from them so I can't say whether they're worthwhile or not. (These days, most of my toys come from DigiKey, and not in kit form.)

I friggin love this site. And here's about as cheap as you're gonna get. Though it won't exactly test your landlines.
http://www.electronickits.com/kit/complete/fibe/ck1500.htm

To save yourself frustration and headaches later, DON'T START SOLDERLESS! Learn how to solder first! Flow solder down a long wire. Strip parts out of a circuit board and put them back in without damaging them, without burning the board and checking with a magnifying glass that you don't have any solder tips that cross over onto the neighboring point. Get comfortable removing whole chips using both solder wick and a solder-sucker. Learn the components of solder so you're not wondering why you're leaving "tan stuff" (resin) on the board. Cut several parallel 'wires' on a circuit board and then fix it with solder and a single strand of copper wire ... if you learn how to solder first you'll save yourself the frustration of knowing how to fix a problem but lacking the actual skill to do so.

I'd look around for kits aimed at high school students. My senior year of high school I took an electronics course where we had to put together a radio from a kit. The good thing about a radio is that there's a lot of cans that need tweaking and points that need to be seen on an oscilloscope to get everything properly calibrated. In fact, this is the kit I used (note that I'm not endorsing the seller. I just happened across the product is all).

I'd go ahead and pick up an electronics text book geared toward college students as well.

...and start memorizing that v=i*r starting now.

Going back 40 years, HeathKit and to a lesser degree Radio Shack were the big names in home electronics kits. Projects ranged from simple amplifiers and AM radios to electronic organs and TV's.

Going back about 35 years with the dawn of the microcomputers, IMASI and ALTAIR were branded kits. I was very surprised to see that IMSAI is still around: www.imsai.net For that matter, you can still build an Altair 8800 using NOS (new old stock) www.altairkit.com

Moving into the early 80's, the Timex Sinclair made a 4 chip z80 set. Believe it or not, you can still buy that one too. www.zebrasystems.com

About that time we also tried out an OKI Semiconductor evaluation kit for a digital PCM encoder (think digital answering machines, voice recorders). You can check the various semiconductors manufacturers who publish evaluation kits, sometimes with sample projects for a slightly more advanced challenge.

Wow, in one.... Guessing is your friend.

http://www.electronickits.com/

I believe you can find sound memory boards -

for 30 dollars complete with actual wire terminals etc.

try http://electronickits.com/kit/complete/audi/ck1212 .htm

link

1. US purchased printer would not work on 220V without a power supply replacement (which can only be purchased from printer parts suppliers and swapping it out voids your warranty). Not an issue if you don't print I suppose.
2. UPS. After many power outages in the US in several different East Coast locations (Boston, Washington D.C., and southern Virginia) I had come to rely on my UPS (from APS). After shipping the 50 pound battery across the Atlantic, only then did I realise that it was not compatible with 220V! Quite a surprise that you should not have to deal with (not the power outage which you should expect, but the lugging around of a 50 lb battery)

By the way - don't forget to check the voltages on your networking equipment. Most of the modern network hubs, switches, etc. will be ok for 110-220V, but you'll need several adapter plugs or power cords (if you're lucky and the cord can be swapped). Or replace the power supplies with "universal adapters" - something like this is inexpensive ($14).

Regarding extension cords and "power strips": I had brought my "high quality" power strips from the US - the ones with built in surge protectors - in hindsight it's no surprise that the "extra" 110 V is considered a surge.
So now I have a pile of extension cords and power strips that are completely useless. :(

One more tip: Before you go and purchase conversion plugs for your equipment, you may just want to purchase new power cords ($2.50) that are usually cheaper that the conversion plug ($15), plus it will be the proper size for US outlets. The UK plugs will usually make every-other outlet on a US power strip unusable due to the size difference.

You'll probably find that, even with light traffic, 802.11b is going to be too slow and unrealiable for 30fps streaming video...

Since you are going to output to a TV anyway, why bother with computers/802.11b and broadcast directly using a small TV transmitter. I would have expected Ramsey to have a transmitter kit, but all they seem to have these days is a semi-cheesey 'cube' transmitter. Even so, the high powered version might be good enough for what you are looking for, especially with a good antenna.

A quick Google search turned up some other kits. Most of these have a fairly short range, but with good antennas, they'll easily transmit further (and with higher quality), than compressed video over 802.11b. Plus, if you get a kit, building it can be a nice little project for an electronically minded student.

Then, I bought a bunch of 10/100 Ethernet cards that had EEPROM sockets and used EtherBoot to create a boot image for it. You can also make a boot image on the web here, here, or here .

You'll need a way to program the EEPROM, but there are lots of places to get info about that.

The only directories that are not identical across the virtual machines are /etc, /var, along with the obvious /dev, /boot, /proc, and so on. /usr and /home are the same mount on each "machine."

I got a relay kit from Carl's Electronics which switches 8 relays and works brilliantly. Great fun!