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The kind of chargers that charge the batteries in a holder directly under the solar panel are no good, because the batteries are destroyed by excessive heat. This was my experience near sea level in equatorial Africa. Although a friend that lived nearby but in the mountains didn't have this problem because of the cooler climate.

I wish I'd had something more like this. I haven't used it, but it looks more like what would have worked best for me. I would buy separate battery holders and use the alligator clips.

Keep batteries out of the sun!

Or maybe it is you, who is in parallel universe? :)

RSR HY3002-3

Best price I've seen on this: http://www.elexp.com/kit_x909.htm

If I remember correctly, ads in Nuts & Volts and Circuit Cellar magazines list these at around $179.

http://www.nutsvolts.com/
http://www.circuitcellar.com/

you can't be a true geek without learning to solder.

The bigger the glob, the better the job!

Basic soldering tips.

Yikes.

Don't buy the cheapest soldering iron you can find.

Get one with an iron plated tip. Use good flux. Use Good Soldering Technique.

I'm one of those guys who buys your stuff after you're tired of it at a swapmeet. Don't make a horrid wreck of it, leaving corrosive flux and burn marks all over the inside.

I just got a multimeter from RSR electronics for about $50 . It works great as a multimeter, but I have yet to actually hook it up to my computer. It only comes with Windoze 9x software, of course, but I don't imagine it would be too hard to write a Linux driver for it if one doesn't already exist. I guess I know what I'm doing this weekend...

I was partial to the 7400 series myself.

-- MarkusQ

http://www.elexp.com/computer/45cg26m.gif
8^)

Xilinx makes a field programmable gate array which allows you to wire the thing on the fly. That is, they'll sell you a chip which contains anywhere from 100,000 gates to 1,000,000 gates which can be dynamically wired to provide all sorts of functionality, from microprocessor cores to UARTs to RAM cells. You don't need millions in fab equipment. Just one of these chips and an EEPROM programmer and some freeware software (links here) will do the trick.

It's not the same as editing masks using a VLSI design tool, but it does the trick.

Further, most people who design chips don't have or need millions in fab equipment. When I was at Caltech about a dozen years ago, I took a class on VLSI design where we simulated the results, and for the final, sent our design to a fab house which specializes in one-off fabrication for testing. One-off fabrication costs a few hundred to a few thousand per chip, but gives you a way to test your designs in hardware once your prototype checks on the simulator software.

Beyond that, you don't really even need to do this if you simply want to translate your FPGA design into an ASIC core for mass production. There are several fab houses who will take your FPGA data and turn it into an ASIC core for you by automatically laying out the chip-level logic from the FPGA data.

So no, you don't need "tens of millions of dollars worth of fab equipment." Far from it; just a couple of FPGA samples from Xilinx, and some software, and some descrete components for building prototype circuitry that uses your FPGA circuit from a company such as Electronix Express will do the trick.

And hell, just poke around the Free IP site; they've got two processor cores available for download, including one of which simulates the 6502 very well on several FPGA vendor's products.