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Best Electronics Kits For Adults?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm an adult looking to learn how electronics work and have some fun building projects. But all the kits I've found online are for kids 8-10 years old, and they don't really explain the principles — they just color-code where to place components on boards. Are there any kits aimed at adults? I know if anyone has got the answer, it's this community."
Too...many...jokes...*keels over and dies*
(Are the editors just trying to bait us now?)
http://www.heathkit.com/ i remember my father made a bunch of things many years ago, like an oscilliscope and such.
mod me funny
In some soon-to-be-forbidden in the UK movies I have seen these sets of electrodes, if you know what I mean, wink wink, nudge nudge.
A good place to start might be to just browse the electronics/tech section at your bookstore. I think this has a better chance of explaining the fundamentals of circuit design. Maybe use this in conjunction with a kid designed for kids?
It's been a long time since I built a Heathkit, do they still make them? My two favorites were my sixty watt guitar amplifier and my ham radio reciever; this was in the last '60s when I was a teenager.
But you're not really going to learn about electronics by building stuff from kits. Read books; when you have the theory then you can get the kits and will understand what's going on with them.
The library is your friend. It's often better than Google and Wikipedia combined.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
If you want to know about digital electronics and microprogramming, try a Nerdkit.
Wow, in one.... Guessing is your friend.
http://www.electronickits.com/
http://www.amazon.com/gp/explorer/0521370957/2/ref=pd_lpo_ase/104-7876853-6599140? buy generic components
wha'? where am i?
http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=MKSL1
pretty basic kit, but for the price you get alot of stuff that will help you on your way to doing better stuff. Decent documentation too.
Electronics Learning Lab Designed by Forrest Mims and sold by radio shack.
You could also do with picking up his Getting Started in Electronics book. It is like a field journal for electrical theory, very fun read.
Hope that points you in the right direction.
-Scott
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
Think they went out of business at one time, but it looks like they are back.
This isn't exactly what you are looking for but it's along the same lines, and lots of fun. Costs $109 and you can find lots of nifty howto guides for building gadgets with it on their forums and whatnot. They sell all sorts of servos, stepper motors, buttons, etc to go along with it.
http://www.makingthings.com/products/KIT-MAKE-CTRL
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radio shack would have been a convenient stop. The out of print book by Forest Mims... wait, this is the intarweb... http://www.forrestmims.com/
there ya go!
Find any fluorescent light fixture and just open her up. You can spend hour playing around with the wires, seeing which ones zap you and which ones don't.
I've been having fun buying and building the various kits available from http://www.adafruit.com/ . You need to solder to do them, but that's really really easy.
The Arduino projects are particularly cool (the ethernet and the WAV shields are cheap and fun) so you can do electronics as well as program microprocessors.
Velleman has a bunch of kits too; many are for little kids, but I built an interesting USB breakout kit (USB control of a bunch of output and input lines).
What a strange bird is the pelican, his beak can hold more than his belly can.
If you are into audio at all, there are tons of kits around for building amps and preamps and stuff.
There are Chipamp kits around for just about all difficulty levels.
Now, they usually don't include the kind of instructions that actually explains whats going on, but if you start with simple things you can figure it out.
She has some fun projects, like the TVBgone. Useful too!
http://www.adafruit.com/
If you're looking at electronic kits for "adults", then why not consider building your own amplifier ?
A quick search for DIY audio will reveal a magnitude of kits and projects, many of which are definitely NOT for novices. :)
What you'll get in the end would most likely be an awesome sounding amp, that would possibly be better than something costing 10x that in retail
Oh, and if your hardcore, why not build a tube amp ? Working with over 300V ... definitely not for kiddies !
The old HeathKits, like oscilliscopes and ham radios, were of value as exercises in assembly and part identification. Beyond getting a general sense of what the circuitry was about, I never learned anything about electronics from building such stuff.
Decades ago when I was a kid I subscribed to a "science kit of the month" advertised on the back of comic books. They kind of built on top each other - one month an amplifier, then a telegraph, then a radio, etc. The subscription was like an outrageous $5 a month - about a third of my paper-route profits. My parents then used to complain about me stinking up the basement with the soldering gun. My guess is that someone declared this dangerous and it went off the market pretty much like chemistry kits have also been emasculated. Then I suppose if it was these days I'd be hacking computers then.
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=electricity+kit+learn+adult&btnG=Google+Search
this place looks especially promising:
http://www.scienceprojects.net/Physical%20Science/Physical%20Science%20ELECTRICITY.htm
Parallax STAMP kit with book and software, available at Radio Shack or online.
Really nice little kit that's fun. Great support forums on the web.
I started out with a digital and analog multimeter, soldering pen and iron, some forceps, radio shack reference on electronics, and a pinball machine.
Still not a great whiz at electronics, but can troubleshoot and repair pinball machines and video games.
It has electronic theory as well as a number of kits you can buy or build from scratch.
Great projects that encompass all types of electronics. My favorite place to find kits! http://www.makershed.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=20 Enjoy! Slewfoot
Although not all kit-based, there's a plethora of DIY electronics resources on the web that give schematics, tutorials, and places to buy components. Here's a good starting place:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=diy+electronics&btnG=Google+Search
If you want to learn, use the manufacturer's application notes and start from there. Usually they have sample circuits with equations. Buy your parts from Digikey.
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EDN magazine has electronic design ideas with instructions (not "kits" however): http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=news&spacedesc=designIdeas&industryid=44217 Here is the website's summary: "EDN's Design Ideas, contributed by practicing electronics engineers, deliver practical, innovative circuit designs in a concise format complete with circuit schematic diagrams, application details, and even software code. Design Ideas focus on topics/applications including analog functions, filters, power management, display drivers, FPGAs, microcontrollers, sensors, and much more."
Here you go, not a kit but plenty to read and learn. This is where I would start and once you understand it, pick a project and build it from scratch.
http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/
Once you have the understanding, you can create printed circuit boards with Eagle (free for non-commercial use)
http://www.cadsoftusa.com/
and have Sparkfun order your PCBs via BatchPCB
http://www.batchpcb.com/
This is how I got into building my own robots, not the ones from kits but scratch build by ordering the parts and doing my own designs.
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For foreign readers... attaching "adult" to any description in the Excited States means that it is sexual in nature...
Which is why the jokes are flying under this topic
Start by learning about logic circuits and building some yourself using a software simulator like Logisim. Once you get the basics down, you can build some really complex circuits (logisim lets you "package" entire circuits in ICs, just like you would if you built a real chip.
http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~burch/logisim/
Crossplatform too ;)
Try and build an LCD controller ;-) Once you get circuit logic down you'll really have a good understanding of how electronics work on a fundamental level. Then you can start to move to hardware, perhaps by getting a reprogrammable FPGA setup and building projects with that.
appleguru.org
Skip the kids' kits and get yourself a solderless breadboard and ordinary bare components. You're a big boy, you can be trusted not to eat the resistors.
Here's a good book: "Getting Started in Electronics", by Forrest M. Mims III.
Radio Shack used to be the place for this kind of thing: you could get assortments of resistors and capacitors, and lots of basic semiconductors. These days, not many RS's have this stuff, and it's overpriced, but it might still be your best bet. mouser.com and digikey.com are good sources for EVERYTHING, but it's all a la carte, and you want the buffet.
The book There are no Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings by Kenn Amdahl is excellent for learning theory, it is a very creative approach, that is almost impossible to not understand.
Also, anything by Richard P. Feyman are also excellent to read.
Just an FYI, Radioshack Stores are moving away from being the parts store we all loved. They are now trying to be more competitive in Cell Phones and Satellite dishes. You can thank their CEO for this. It's not very easy to find a Radioshack that still has a lot of parts in stock, let alone kits.
It's best to order it online as most stores won't have what you're looking for. Also another idea is to call up your local colleges who offer courses. They often sell kits or can tell you where their students buy kits. Those places ALWAYS have additional info.
The project lists can range from simple circuits to digital electronics. Learning how to build your own Amplifier for your stereo you quickly realize what massive profit margins these companies have, and you start to wonder why medical equipment that performs simple functions costs tens of thousands of dollars.
In the Good Old Days, we had Heathkit, Eico Kits, and Knight Kits (Allied Radio). The last kit that I built was a Heath AR1500 AM/FM Stereo receiver that I purchased in 1972. It's still running today.
Today, there's not much out there. The local hobby store sells simple kits from Velleman http://www.vellemanusa.com/us/enu/product/list/?id=523008 but these don't compare to the kits of the 60s & 70s.
I guess that's it's a lot cheaper to buy the product assembled and tested from China than it is to build your own.
The ARRL handbook is a good source of do it yourself electronic projects geared toward Amateur Radio.
Learning electronics is easier with a project that means something to you. I'm into photography, so I learned by building a sound trigger for my camera for high speed photography.
You can get kits containing the components you need here: http://www.hiviz.com/
And use them to make pictures like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bernieandjude/2578082432/
The kit comes with instructions and a circuit diagram. All else you need is a book like Starting Electronics by Keith Brindley to help you interpret the diagram.
foo mane padme hum
Since Heathkit is long dead, I'd suggest the Parallax learning kit. It is more focused into the Parallax microcontroller but it has basic electronics and formulae explained in the experiments. My local RatShack wants $80 per complete kit (board, book, servo, semiconductors, jumper wires) but I was able to buy one for $35 on eBay...
Have you consider attending a basic eletronics course? or maybe a tech school ...
...
It may sound a little too much for a hobby, but I think it's nice to get some basic knowledge in order to start on the right tracks.. I mean, after a good course, you can buy the components yourself, search the projects on google and build it without those pre-built kits.. I think it's way cooler
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Find out what they use. Buy their lab manuals and buy parts a la carte.
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No question - microcontrollers to make complex stuff easy, basic electronics to interface with it. Love it!
The old Radio Shack Science Fair 150-IN-1 electronic kits were quite good for learning analog electronics. They seemed to be aimed at teenagers and young adults, so the materials were a lot more useful than some of the other kits aimed at little kids. The accompanying book went to a lot of effort to explain how each project worked, and in language that was reasonably easy for normal people to understand. I imagine these kits have been out of production for ages, but plenty of them are still available on the used market (eBay for example). If you contemplate a used one for sale, make sure it comes with the book.
Try the Funway into Electronics series from Dick Smith or the Short Circuit Series from Jaycar. They are written to be simple enough for kids but are actually soundly based and suitable as a first step for adults. Each project aims to demonstrate a principle, includes explanation and builds on previous projects to form a short course. The books are the most important thing. The mentioned shops sell accompanying kits but the components are all generic and can be picked up at any electronics store around the world.
Funway was my first exposure to electronics and today I am a professional electrical engineer (with a few intervening steps required).
You are an adult, and can buy your own parts, so have no need for kits.
All you need to get started is this book - it is basically the de-facto standard for learning electronics.
"Getting Started in Electronics" - Forest M Mims III
http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Electronics-Forrest-Mims/dp/0945053282/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213973092&sr=8-1
This book is basically the bible for newcomers to electronics. Buy it, you will not be disappointed. He starts off with the simple, progresses to the relatively complex, and explains all the principles along the way. Every project comes with a complete parts listing, and lots of diagrams and illistrations to help along the way. Also there is some great reference pages included that I STILL refer to occasionally.
Seriously. The kits have nice big, brightly coloured bits which are physically large and easy to handle. They are also relatively hard to break. You don't really need those featues. Instead, get a good beginners book, for instance by Forest M. Mimms III, a solderless breadbroad, and then buy the components mentioned in the book. You can then start assembling them on the breadboard.
For what it's worth, I'd duggest the following:
Several reels of 100 metal film resistors, 100OHm, 1K, 10K, 100K and 1M.
A bag of brestripped, tinned and finished wires of various lengths for breadboard prototyping.
A reel of single core wire (for when the premade ones won't quite stretch).
Several bags of capacitors (100p 1n 10n 100n ceramic, polyester, mica or mylar and 1u 100u and 1000u in electrolytic). You want maybe 20 of the smaller ones and 10 of the larger ones.
A nice big bag of cheap transistors. These are a little trickier, but all of the low priced ones will be similar. You probably want something like 20 small ones like BC108 (NPN, low power) a corresponding PNP one and 5 medium power ones like BFY51.
10 cheap LEDs
1 Buzzer
1 loudspeaker
A good powersupply. You won't need more than 1Amp, but you probably want 0--15V variable, and 2 outputs if you can manage it. This is the mist expensive part, but you could just get a 9V wall wart if this is a problem. Batteries get annoying quite fast.
This will set you up way better than a kit.
You can also add to it later. You can buy a rail of 741 op amps (indestructible, and still popular even though they're 20 years obsoloete) and 555 oscillator chips. Later still you can get some logic ICs.
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Personally I suggest that you pick up some cheap electronics at goodwill, and disect them. That, along with wikipedia is how i learned about how stuff works. I've never been much of one for tech books, i just zone off when reading them.
I begged my parents for the Radio Trash-marketed 160-in-one and 200-in-one kits and had lots of fun with those. The instruction books explained the concepts and even touched on a little theory.
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If you are into (or want to be) audio
http://tangentsoft.net/audio/
Else
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/
What about one of Andre LaMothes console kits? They are more oriented to making your own gaming console but get right into electronic basics, you have to build the XGS yourself so you get practical experience and comes with a book (I think its called Black Art of console design). Check it out: http://www.xgamestation.com/ P
MAKE Magazine has a number of different kits available for an adult. There is this kit which has basic components (LEDs, resistors, capacitors, etc.) There are also programmable controller board kits available if you wish to tackle something more challenging. If you are looking to read up on the subject, a classic book would be The Art of Electronics. Even though it is becoming dated, a lot of the principles of electronics design are clearly laid out.
In the process of explaining why so many textbooks about electronics are full of misconception, William Beaty gives easy to understand layman explanations of electrical theory. Without an understanding of electrical theory, electronics is just voodoo plugging of components to make a 'recipe'. The best part? It's free as in beer http://amasci.com/miscon/elect.html
I totally sympathize with you. I'm always looking for stuff to build but there really isn't much complex out there. I would love a little 16 bit computer or something. Something like the replica 1 only more complicated.
Of what I've built, there is one and only one answer. The ultimate kit, the best out there, the Elecraft K2. I've built that, the KPA100 power amplifier, the KAT100 tuner, and a few little modules for it. It took me weeks to build it all. It was amazing.
Kit building is why I got into Ham Radio. The only problem is... I don't seem to care about the rest of ham radio. I haven't operated much. I keep meaning to do more to see if I like it better, but I don't seem to care enough to get around to it. I'm thinking of selling my K2 since it's just sitting around.
Other than that there are a few kits out there. A Nixie tube clock, while not too complicated, looks interesting. I ran across an all transistor clock kit the other day. It looks quite neat.
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haven't run through these myself, but i keep finding them referenced on instructables, and various sites. This plus your local parts source might do the trick: http://www.tech-systems-labs.com/navy.htm
If you really want to understand Electronics, then this book really deserves your attention. Not only does it clearly explain many of the concepts, it also stretches your understanding by showing you examples of circuits that do not work. It is an essential text if you want deep knowledge on this subject.
On the other hand, if you are only interested in making shortwave radios, this book is overkill.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
OK, this is totally not the cool answer, but I started with this one:
http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102913&cp=2032062.2032398&parentPage=family
It comes with two books, one on digital and one on analog circuits. I outgrew it quickly, but it got me far enough along to step up to a breadboard and raw parts. The circuits cover extreme beginner to, say, apprentice - so it's not going to last long if it appeals to you. But that was great for me as it completely evaporated any fear I had of the complexity. I like to be a tough guy as much as anyone else, but sometimes it's nice not to be in over your head.
The next step I took was "The Art of Electronics" (brilliant book) and a breadboard. That was a bit of a leap, but very good for analog circuits. On the digial side, check out Lady Ada and Evil Mad Scientist:
http://www.adafruit.com/
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/
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On the diyforums.org there are a number of headphone amp projects that vary in skill level. I've made several, lots of fun. http://www.diyforums.org/MAX/MAXoverview.php
The entire US Navy Electricity & Electronics Training Series (NEETS) is online in PDF book format here:
http://www.phy.davidson.edu/instrumentation/NEETS.htm
This explains virtually every part of electronics you could possibly want.
(Bonus: as it was produced by the US government, there is no copyright; download, read, print, copy, etc. as much as you'd like.)
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You didn't say what *kind* of electronics you want to learn about. Ramsey Electronics has some general-interest kits, as do Jameco and JDR. TenTec has simple ham radio kits (with excellent support), so do Vectronics (part of MFJ Enterprises) and Small Wonder Labs. Elecraft has fancier ham radio kits (multiband stuff more in line with the old high-end Heathkits). And PAiA has audio kits. (All of these companies have obvious website URLs.)
If you want a stepping stone to building your own digital stuff, most of the IC companies put out really wonderful evaluation boards to show off their parts. They're not kits themselves but they're very much intended to get your juices flowing (the IC vendors want corporate customers to choose their parts to use in products so easy prototyping is vital) so they're easy to get to the "hello world" stage (or the lights-and-switches equivalent) and there's plenty of provision for adding your own stuff to it and then transplanting the whole thing to a free-standing design once you have your rat's nest prototype debugged. Prices vary wildly but some of them are really good deals.
I'm a huge fan of Microchip PIC CPUs because you don't need to buy *anything*, the programming protocol is simple and well-documented (none of that convoluted JTAG stuff) so you can build your own burner for a few dollars (I use the old "COM84" circuit available on the net, modified to work with the low voltages put out by current COM ports) and free burner software (or you can write your own, it's easy).
Try paia.com if you want to play with audio electronics.Amps,Effects,Synths,Vocoders and much more.They even have a nice Theremin.
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Parallax.com has a kit that is also available from Radio Shake.
It allows you to program an IC with your computer and build the electronic components around it that interact with the IC.
They have different kits that use different language but for basic "process control" I like the Basic Stamp
You can see their stuff at http://www.parallax.com
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.
If you're also a musician, there's "Electronics Projects for Musicians" by Craig Anderton. As it is from the 70's, it's probably on of the most basic things you could find that's for adults.
Here's another vote for Forrest Mims books and solderless breadboards. Also, this is helpful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_analogy
...memories, all alone posting on Slashdot...
My dad built a HeathKit tube stereo amplifier some time before he and my mom got married and it was what we used well into the 80's, when he went out and bought a solid state piece of junk with a cardboard bottom. Being 15, I promptly disassembled the tube amp and utterly destroyed it. I wish I had it now to run the output of my little Ubuntu media server through...
Seriously - make your own kit.
You need:
- Plug in solderless breadboard. Get something reasonably big.
- An assortment of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Many suppliers sell bags of common values for these.
- Some transistors: get some NPN and PNP small signal bipolar transistors. Get some N and P channel small signal MOSFETs.
- A few 555 timer ICs.
- A handful of 74-series logic ICs (typical quad gates, flip flops, shift registers).
And of course a whole heap of LEDs. You need some blinkenlights when learning.
With this you can look at the 'net - for example, while reading 'Lessons in Electric Circuits' http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/ you can devise circuits to expand your knowledge on what you've just read.
You also need at least a reasonable multimeter. As you start getting into stuff that oscillates at more than a few hertz, and if you are enjoying what you're doing, it's worth looking on ebay for a reasonable 2nd hand oscilloscope.
As you get more advanced, you can get microcontrollers, for example, get some Atmel AVR 8 bit microcontrollers - they are supported by GCC and you can make your own parallel programmer with an old printer lead and 4 resistors. Or build a proper computer with external memory - the Z80 microprocessor is still made, and is cheap, and is great for tinkering because it is a 'static' design and run at sub 1Hz clock frequencies where you can see what's happening by putting LEDs on the data and address bus.
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Ramsey Electronics
Great radio projects - one of the best ones for aviation! Other stuff too and they explain the circuits and how to modify them if you want.
I don't know if this has come up already, but there's a handy online circuit simulator here:
www.falstad.com/circuit
You can create circuits from scratch or load and play with a large library of existing circuits. I used it a lot in grad school when I had to build something electronic for the lab, just to make sure it was going to do what I expected.
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Here's a list of sites that have helped me over the years. Also, I agree with an earlier poster that kits won't really teach you much about electronics (though you'll get good soldering experience from them).
http://openbookproject.net/electricCircuits/ - This site has a series of excellent (and free) electronics books that start with the basics and move on from there.
http://www.parallax.com/ - While these kits are a bit costly, they have some of the best learning materials for working with micro-controllers (outside of audio, micro-controllers dominate the electronics industry these days). I highly recommend, "What's a Microcontroller" as a starting kit (it has everything you need). Also, the Propeller chip is just cool.
http://www.arduino.cc/ - Next to Parallax, the Arduino community offers a much cheaper, and comparable, alternative. Everything here is open source (from the hardware to the software). You might consider downloading the freely available books from Parallax, and translate the code to Arduino as a learning exercise.
http://www.xgamestation.com/ - Andre has some great (and fun) kits for game development and electronics. I sometimes find Andre's writing difficult to read, but ymmv. I have his CPLD kit, and it's great.
http://www.makezine.com/ - Lots of electronics here.
And finally, a short selection of tutorials, blogs and project pages:
http://www.electronics-lab.com/index.html
http://www.embedds.com/
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/hdr.php?p=tutorials
http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/
There's a ton more that I've come across over the years (remember google is your friend). Just do a search for "learning basic electronics", and you'll have a lifetime of reading (a good percentage will suck, but it's there =).
Enjoy.
I have the Make board and like it because it gives my students experience with an ARM processor.
For someone wanting to learn a bit of electronics, I like the Arduino www.arduino.cc better. The web site has great tutorials on how to connect peripherals to the board. The board is designed to be a multimedia controller and it is designed to be used by artists. It is very easy to program but it is also easy to insert a bit of assembly code if you want things to run faster.
Electronics these days is usually a matter of hooking 'stuff' up to a micro-controller. ie. cpu + dsp + lcd + keypad + radio = cell phone I tell my students that if we were to try building a cell phone out of raw transistors, the result would fill up the room. Trying to do electronics the 'old way' is interesting but maybe not that useful.
but I'd say that it depends on what you are wanting to learn. Learning about radio and building a simple radio to help learn is one thing. It can be accomplished without having to learn digital electronics, using discrete analog parts; these are the basic building components of electronics. When I first learned electronics that is how I started.
If you buy a kit, it is likely that there will be digital parts included. They tend to complicate matters of comprehension.
If you have a good understanding of basic electronics and want to learn more about the digital side of things, many here have made good suggestions. You can Google for basic circuit and kits. You could start out with something simple like an alarm clock or Christmas tree light sequencer.
If money isn't the main problem, many micro-controller manufacturers have trainer or development kits. Some fully contained, some not. Again, you can Google for these like so:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=controller+trainer+kit+assemble&btnG=Search and there is a link to Jameco which has several kits that might be of interest.
You might still find a few good books in 1/2 price books or similar. I'd also recommend trying yahoo groups or similar and joining a discussion group that is concerned with people like yourself that are concerned with learning electronics.
Additional fun might be had by joining an offline group such as a hobby robotics group. If you are in the states, Dallas (DPRG), Seattle (SRS) both have active discussion groups. Robotics if for generalists who want and try to learn about all aspects of electronics, from basics to laser guidance systems. They also tend to explain things to one another in a helpful way :)
Have fun, hope that helps
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Field programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs http://www.xilinx.com/) are increasingly being used in the classrooms for teaching digital electronics. You can get a good starter board with 500K gates for around 150 bucks and the design software is free from the FPGA vendors.
Heres a couple of links to FPGA based development boards:
If you're looking to include embedded programming in your projects I recommend picking up the "evaluation" or "starter" kits that all controller vendors sell to support their projects. They come with all the hardware you need to get started with embedded programming and they're easy to interface to your kit circuits. What they often don't include are the software development tools, although sometimes the software tools are bundled with the kit.
My personal favorite is TIs "Experimenter's Board" for their MSP430 micros:
http://focus.ti.com/docs/toolsw/folders/print/msp-exp430fg4618.html
That one's fairly advanced and costs $100 (not including the programming cable), if you use a simpler controller like a PIC you can find a cheaper alternative.
I had an old Radio Shack kit from the early 90's that came with a big thick instruction manual that explaned all the theories and principals...I really liked it.
too bad later on I used the kit as a spare parts bin. Now its missing too much stuff to be useful.
Try Ramsey Electornics, they sell some nice kits. http://www.ramseyelectronics.com/
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the "Art of Electronics" books.....
The Art of Electronics (Hardcover)
by Paul Horowitz (Author), Winfield Hill (Author)
They (might) be becoming slightly dated at this point, but (AFAIK) they're the books used by one of the MIT electronics courses.
http://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-Paul-Horowitz/dp/0521370957/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213974698&sr=8-1
You'd want the lab manual as well...
http://www.amazon.com/Laboratory-Manual-Electronics-Paul-Horowitz/dp/0521285100/ref=sid_dp_dp
I found both books at the local Barnes and Nobles. (And I don't recall paying quite so much for them a year ago.)
Read the sections your interested in, and just "do it".
David
This starter kit comes with basic circuit building instructions and soldering tips, as well as an explanation of the circuit. You can plug any wall-wart into this and then plug it into a breadboard to get 3.3 or 5V, or anything else with an added pot. Good if you don't want to invest in a bench-top power supply and just need small power.
The Velleman kits mentioned above are good because they usually come with circuit and component explanations.
When I wanted to get into robotics, I just dove right in. Bought some books on electronics and started buying tools and components.
For components, there are a lot of options. Check out E-bay and any of the many electronics surplus suppliers on the internet. For specific components, Mouser and Digi-Key tend to be excellent.
I'd recommend buying some of the mix packs of things like resistors, capacitors, ICs, etc. You can usually get variety packs of them pretty cheap.
As for books, Horowitz' The Art of Electronics is generally considered the bible, and for good reason. Any other basic book on electronics (Idiot's Guide type stuff is good) help as a second point of view, particularly if one description doesn't make sense to you, perhaps the way another author phrases it will.
As for projects, the if you don't have any ideas of your own, there are plenty of internet sites with ideas and schematics. There are several volumes of The Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits, as well, which tend to have a variety of cool little projects. Buy a few breadboards or wirewrap boards and start building... I find breadboards to be pretty good for doing small projects.
Heathkits were good for learning physically working with electronics. Soldering irons, pin identification, mechanical assembly, but didn't really teach theory.
The 150 and 200-in-1 radio shack kits actually did a fairly good job of this. They started you out with "connect the numbered terminals, here's a picture", to later replacing the picture of the parts with a schematic. They encouraged you to experiment, and there was accompanying text for each project later on that described what was going on in the circuit so you understood what all the parts were doing.
It didn't teach you electronics theory formally in any kind of structured way, but it was an excellent crash-course in basic electronics. It was also a very quick way to teach you how to read, use, and create schematics. There are still 200-in-1 kits available but not by Archer anymore: http://www.quasarelectronics.com/epl200.htm
There really are 200 different projects in that kit, ranging from very very basic, "press the switch to turn on the light" all the way up to "a divide-by-2 counter" and "build your own one way telephone". It teaches the basics of digital computing at the gate level which is interesting. Also there was a very wide variation in the projects. Something interesting for everyone. Photodetector alarms, simple games, noisemakers, just all sorts of variety to keep a kid interested.
Once you want to really start fiddling, this is something you should have. It doesn't teach you anything in itself, but lets you play more: Heathkit ET-3100 electronic design experimenter: http://providence.craigslist.org/ele/696855286.html
I had one of these and it's very basic, but by this point you should have some spare parts around already, and having adjustable voltages and signals and a breadboard takes you to the next step of design. Actually I think it did come with some projects, it's been awhile. This was a kit, so you had to assemble it properly for it to work. I used to spend my free time at school planning out schematics of things I wanted to tinker with, sometimes preplanning how to lay them out on the breadboard when I got home.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The think that I think is best is to use a good book like http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Principles-Albert-P-Malvino/dp/0028028333 (this book only covers analog electronics), buy some kits and use the book to find the principles used in the kit.
Digi-key is good too, but you just can't beat Mouser. They have EVERYTHING you need, they ship fast, and their packaging is just darned elegant. They're not the cheapest, but most parts are so cheap that it doesn't make much of a difference.
For the basics, you can earn your Amateur Radio Licenses. They require you learn some basic electronic principles that are beyond most of the kits.
I have played with the kits and they did not help. What I had to know to earn my amateur extra radio license required more knowledge. No morse code anymore, just 3 multiple choice licenses where all the questions are published.
What you learn is also specific to radios. Filters, amplifiers( sound and power), transmitter and receiver circuits. You learn what it means to apply Kirchhoff's laws. Also to put resistors, capacitors and inductors in serial or parallel configurations. The basics of analyzing power through circuits.
The basic books from amazon work well with the kits from radio shack. Make sure what you get has a breadboard. So I do not think that the snap electronics kits are good for adults. At the makers fair, there was the kit from sparkle labs, http://kits.sparklelabs.com/. The initial parts from sparkle labs are great, but the instructions are bad. But this kit, along with purchasing a reasonable digital multimeter and a book from amazon would be a great start. The kits sold by make magazine are excellent, http://www.makershed.com/. Make magazine is also a great resource,http://makezine.com/magazine/.
For the meter, spend the $50 for one that will test your components, resistors, capacitors, diodes and transistors also.
If you dive in and buy a soldering iron, do not cheap out. Spend the $40 for the basic Weller red soldering station or $110 for the basic blue station. Buy a pointy tip, $5. The chisel tip that comes with it is not good for soldering boards.
There are plenty of books that cover the topic with sample circuits. Look at the books offered at http://arrl.org./
A book "Hand's On Radio Experiments" is an excellent book. It publishes the first 60 articles written for ARRL's QST magazine. You can also buy a kit with all the parts needed to do the experiments. The book (http://www.arrl.org/catalog/?item=1255) and the parts kit (http://www.arrl.org/catalog/?item=1255K) is $100 from the ARRL.
Most of the above covers analog electronics. For digital electronics, there is a lot of support for digital electronics. The basic stamp kits are great for that. They sell very proven kits, http://www.parallax.com/ with very well written manuals that will take more than a weekend to go through. Also through the make magazine site you'll find project sites for other micro processors used by hobbyists.
Also, to have guided lessons, a class with lab at the local community college is also a great way to go if you have the time. After all the long winded crap above, if you really want to learn and want more than to look at a board and know what the parts are, this is probably the best way to go. Either way, depending on the depths of the knowledge you are looking for, it is between months and a couple years of learning.
Hope I see you at a booth selling a kit at the maker faire in a couple of years.
Long ass winded sermon over.
The Heathkit assembly manuals always included a small "How it works" section, but I agree that wasn't enough to get you a through understanding.
Heathkit had projects as large a 27" console color television. The manual had to tell you how to tune and align it as you were building it.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
I found Elenco's "electronics playground" to be really good for a grownup who wanted something more than just tinkertoys with electronics.
The copy in the manual is really pretty conceptual, one concept at a time. I think the "plumbing" analogy is really helpful.
It's conceptual enough I think it would defeat kids under about "algebra age". Of course they could follow the recipes and build the circuits without really getting the concepts, and I don't think that's worthless.
To add to the fun, get a cheap multitester and look at voltage differences etc.
And it's cheap.
Long, long ago, I pulled an all-nighter and built up an H-19 terminal all in one shot. My friends were amazed. So was I, it fired right up and worked perfectly the first time. I owned it for years and actually got a decent price when I sold it. I still have no idea how it worked.
The Evil Genius book series is fantastic!! I took a class in college (Build your Evil Robot Army) that was designed around this book. It teaches the basic concepts of circuits, digital logic, computer programming, and robotics. It isn't really a kit, but it includes parts lists for everything needed. When I completed the course (we did about 45~50 experiments from the book, approx part cost was 150 bux) I had enough knowledge that I was bored outa mind in a Fundamentals of Electronics course I took at a different college. IF you are looking for a good start I highly suggest checking out this book, it is funny, smart, very informative, and well rounded. Oh it also makes you do all the math involved. I also suggest getting a bread board and learning to solder (its not hard at all, don't buy a cold heat gun, they suck), always test your circuits before you solder them or else you get the fun task of removing solder. http://www.amazon.com/123-Robotics-Experiments-Evil-Genius/dp/0071413588
Those drawers are mostly empty now and often you can't find stuff as basic as a DB-25 connector or a stereo plug. The "help" is no help and has no idea what you are talking about.
Posting as anonymous because I might not be liked here...
You can find *tons* of resources like:
MIT 6-002 Circuits And Electronics by Prof. Anant Agarwal
MAKE Magazine 2006-2007 Vol 1 to 11
Electronics ebook collection II
and more...
I would also recommend you also a good Bread Board
And of course having a Radioshack or Maplin close to you is a must :)
Get a basic analog electronics textbook (any one, I used 'Electronic Principles' by Malvino) and a breadboard, wires, resistors, batteries, and LEDs. You should be all set.
Follow the book starting page 1. You'll quickly figure out things and not need the textbook a lot anymore.
I bet its better than any electronics kit you will find in the market.
One of my favorite recent kit projects was my PIC Programmer. Unlike the cheap parallel-port varieties, the programmer I got is a quality piece of hardware. It has RS-232 and USB (integrated USB-to-serial) interfaces, an onboard microcontroller running programmer software with a documented protocol, etc. They originate at "KitsRUs" (http://www.kitsrus.com)
The PIC programmers I got from them are kit 149 and 182. 182 isn't really a kit, it's a USB-only ready-made circuit, but it's very handy because it doesn't need a separate power supply and it's really tiny. 149 is the more general-purpose PIC programmer, with USB and serial, a programming socket rather than just ICSP, and the ability to program non-flash devices. (Due to power limitations the USB-powered programmers can't program OTP and UV-erasable chips... But this means that kit 149 needs an external power supply capable of around 19VDC)
They also have kit 128, which combines some of the convenience of kit 182 (it's USB-powered and some of the components are surface-mounted and pre-installed) with the features of kit 149 (presence of a socket, mainly...) But honestly, I'd just go with kit 182. Plan for ICSP and life will be easier and you won't have to spring for a ZIF socket.
Then, of course, you can learn to program PICs and pursue any kind of project you want. :D
You may also want to look into Make Magazine. They have electronics projects in there pretty regularly - you could take their bill of materials and build the circuit.
Bow-ties are cool.
Check out http://www.makezine.com/. It's DIY wet dream for kits!
"Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk."
~Joaquin Setanti
Screw the radio shack cheap junk. Get a nice Weller temp controlled iron or one of those tiny Antex irons. I love my Antex iron, I lost one and just had to get another.
Elenco has some amazing products (humorously a toys r us DIY wiretap kit linked from slashdot).
http://www.elenco.com/
They have some great stuff aimed at all ages, I took a look through, and I was deeply impressed.
What a great company. They have been around for years. I'm gonna build up one of those Theremin for my musician wife and give it to her for Christmas (She doesn't read Slashdot!).
Sounds just about right. The best thing you can do here is to get a decent breadboard, some parts, a good book or two and get started. I agree that the op amps and 555s are a good place to start playing. Personally, I like to get some photo resistors or photo transistors to play with. One can have some easy fun with a light sensitive buzzer and a laser pointer (think laser trip line). Or, get a couple of PLLs (phase locked loops) and start sending your voice or music over a frequency modulated laser beam. There are so many fun things you can do without too much work.
Features of PICkit 2 Starter Kit
Note: Requires the AC162061 ICD Header and AC164110 adapter to debug.
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
This book teaches you how to build a computer starting only with NAND gates:
http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Principles/dp/0262640686
Here's a video introduction to the book/approach on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtXvUoPx4Qs
parallax.com - it's a company that makes chips, boards, etc, and they offer classes for hobbyists. they're in CA, so if you're elsewhere, might want to look at a similar company in your location (sorry, no ideas there). check out this link: http://www.engadget.com/?06051835 to see some things the propellor chip (from Parallax) is used in.
not only is time travel possible, it's irrelevant.
I credit my "kit building days" in helping me get admitted into MIT. As student interviewer nowadays, we are encouraged to look for signs of "active learning", kids who initiate projects on their own rather than passively take what's shoveled into them by the education system even if its college level course work.
In MITs entire fourteen decade history they've always had a labortory requirement for a SB degree. However in recent decades the requirement got watered down to "doing something on the computer" so an EE major could get through never soldered a circuit or chemist with never touching a test tube. But the faculty just change that an re-instituted hands-on lab course requirements.
I learned electronics as an adult. Beginning electronics books found in the library is an excellent place to start. Check many library branches and suburban nearby districts. Often you can get a library card for the suburban district libraries with a central city card at no charge.
Some other suggestions:
>Get a cheap digital voltmeter for about $20. Invaluable.
>Download several of the sound-card oscilloscope programs floating around on the web. Many of them have poor quality user-interfaces and documentation, but nearly all of them work on low-frequency AC signals like audio.
> Get an inexpensive soldering iron and salvage/recycle parts from junk electronics, especially old electronics that used through-hole components. A spring-loaded plastic tube solder-sucker used to remove solder from joints on recycled/used circuit boards is quite useful. A solder-less 'breadboard' where components can be connected to make temporary test circuits is handy. Sometimes community college students in software have to take electronics classes to graduate. They have to buy component kits for labs. After finishing the class, they show their contempt for these electronics classes by selling their supplies for super-cheap or by giving them away.
> Ask 'stupid' questions on 'beginner's' web sites. Ignore all the smart-ass 'stupid noobie' responses.
> Post a message on the local CraigsList for free surplus hobbyist electronic components. You might meet local people who can direct you to local inexpensive parts-sources and assistance.
> Be open to exploring microcontrollers. There's a real learning curve, but they are now very cheap and flexible. I recommend exploring the Atmel AVR family. I strongly discourage using the Microchip PIC, because they are a pain in the neck to program, and are not very cheap. The AVR chips can be programmed directly through the PC parallel port.
> Most electronic manufacturers will give free samples of their parts if you ask them. It is standard practice in the electronics industry to get free samples to build a prototype of a new product, and then buy thousands of the chips when the product goes into production. You can use your work e-mail address to convince the electronics manufacturers that this is your plan with the samples.
> Eagle makes a great free software package for creating schematic drawings of your circuits and, as you advance, for designing a printed circuit board. Google for more info and download site.
> Several companies now make small numbers of small-sized professional quality circuit boards for $35-50. These 'board-houses' are invaluable for use with tiny surface-mount components and integrated circuits that the electronics industry is standardizing on.
I hope that all this helps. I suggest focusing on a specific area that you find interesting. For several years I studied electric guitar effects pedals like fuzz/distortion, flangers, and echo/delays. The schematic circuits (and documentation on how the circuits work) for the older 1970s and 1980s effects are available on the web. Also you can get cheap knock-off clones of expensive effects on eBay for $15-$25 each. With a DIY signal generator (like a simple 555 timer), you can feed signals into these cheap effects clone boxes and use the free PC sound card oscilloscope programs to see how the circuitry is changing the signal through each stage of the effect.
Best of luck.
I highly recommend getting an Arduino board, either an USB or Bluetooth one. They're easily programmable, have 14 digital and 6 analog pins and are quite cheap.
A more advanced board would be this one which is available from Sparkfun (who happen to have all sorts of electronic parts). Comes with an LCD, included SD card reader, 3 axis accelerometer. Wonder if TinyOS runs on it, anyone?
There are lots of cool things that can be done with these boards, google for "arduino projects".
Some nice sites for the electronic geek:
Hackaday
Electronics Lab
Cheers!
local Junior College.
Horowitz and Hill is the best book on electronics that I know of. It does have some handy circuit examples that you can build, but don't think of it as an instruction book for a kit. If you read Horowitz and Hill, you will be ready to go out and design your own circuits.
I haven't tried this, but it looks cool. http://kits.sparklelabs.com/
BoeBot. Small Robot. Solderless breadboard. Instructions. Programmable.
why not take on some big project and build something like that: http://reprap.org/ after completing that you will prolly have understanding of: stepper motor controllers, programmable logic controllers, automation systems, amplifiers, more soldering than you want, mechanics, differences and work principles for dc and stepper motors, heating and temperature control etc
But thou must.
the basic stamp breadboard and the various kits built around it are pretty good IMO.
http://www.parallax.com/
My suggestion is the BOE-BOT. Its manual does a fair compromise between ease of use for beginners and explaining some of the underlying electrical principals for intermediate users. plus you get to build a robot.
If you're more interested in synthesizers and the like, you could check out http://musicfromouterspace.com/
They have quite a few different projects. While they only offer a few "kits" (sometimes), they always have PCBs for sale, along with schematics, parts lists and the like. The projects have good explanations about what is happening in the circuits and, for me at least, provide a decent bit of fun along with something that can actually be useful once it is complete...
This is slippery slope. I started to want principles in the 6th grade, majored in solid state physics and still can't explain how bypolar transistor works. One has to explain quantum mechanics first!
I am an electronic engineer that also builds stuff at home. Get yourself the book "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill, and the Radio Shack electronics kit with the breadboard. It has a power supply, blinkinlights and a half decent selection of parts. www.digikey.com is your friend. Get the additional parts there. I use this setup for prototyping. If it's something I wat to keep, THEN I solder it. Don't worry about soldering now, it's just a skill that is easy to learn (like welding but not as difficult).
Elenco made all the old lab kits for Radio Shack. They still sell the spring-terminal ones. Here's a page where they describe them: http://www.elenco.com/prolabs.htm They are VERY nice, and the upper-end ones have the schematics only (no numbered diagrams) in later experiments to encourage you to learn how to wire the circuits based upon schematics.
There is nothing like someone taking the journey with you. Here in Seattle Wa there is the www.seattlerobotics.org. You may have some other group local to your area. Though the name says robotics, they cater to a diverse crowd of people, any one of which would be willing to help you. Monthly meetings, newsgroup, website, e-zine, and chat to help figure things out. Local communities can be a big help for someone that wants to learn more about electronics and build stuff.
I have learned a lot of electronics by using a small programmable controller like the Arduino -- they call it "physical computing" where you have several A/D and D/A ports to control. A starting kit is less than $40 ...
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/HomePage
See the free digital I/O tutorials ...
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage-0007
This type of learning tool has the advantage of a PC/MAC interface via Bluetooth, WiFi, Ethernet while at the same time using an oscilloscope to look ant both analog and digital waveforms. Enjoy.
The problem with asking for a kit to teach you electronics is like using frozen cookie dough to teach you how to make cookies. When you're done, all you really learned was the assembly process.
A good electronics book, like Art of Electronics, is the best place to start. The basic kits you would buy are made unnecessary by the first few chapters.
Why do you want to learn electronics? Is it to build a radio? Is it to build an I/O interface for your computer? Set out to figure out how to build it without a kit.
My dad used to say, "You have to be smart enough to do it yourself or make enough money to pay someone to do it for you." So you can imagine how much help I had doing things when I was young, so for me, it is natural to just do it myself. Kits are for sissys. :-)
If you're into audio, there are TONS of kits out there.
Check out the paia kits http://www.paia.com/index.asp, and the best audio electronics forum:
http://www.prodigy-pro.com/forum/
Forget morons like Toben who offer broad generalizations without actually clicking on the link for the item they're ranting against.
Consider this a second for NerdKits. They're great. You get a great project book with simple but solid theory, a bread board, and a sandwich bag full of components and wiring.
I noticed a lot of the replies focused on digital kits. But are there any good analog kits? Seems to me that's where the lost art is: downloading code to flash to fix a big is a world away from computing quiescent points by hand.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
These are oldies, but definitely goodies:
Rocky's Boots has you solving logic puzzles involving circuitry.
Robot Odyssey is one of my all time favorites - walk inside of and wire (and re-wire, often in real time!) robots to solve puzzles and make your way through the game world.
You will probably want DOSBox to play these on a modern system.
It amazes me how mentally challenging these games are - I remember playing them in middle school - they were very successful games in their day, but I wonder if kids would have the patience to play them today.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
http://www.forrestmims.com/
This guy writes and creates stuff that's simply great fun and really good, educationally.
I give him a 10 out of 10. When you graduate from his stuff, move on to the stuff by Steve Ciarcia.
- real hackers don't have sigs -
I learned electronics as an adult. Beginning electronics books found in the library is an excellent place to start. Check many library branches and suburban nearby districts. Often you can get a library card for the suburban district libraries with a central city card at no charge. Some other suggestions: >Get a cheap digital voltmeter for about $20. Invaluable. >Download several of the sound-card oscilloscope programs floating around on the web. Many of them have poor q
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges, Degrees, and Programs
In QST, the ARRL's monthly magazine, there is a monthly column explaining the basics of circuits. QST has gradually been simplified over the years to the point where it is an excellent resource for beginners, and the topics cover a lot more than radio.
Make magazine and their website have dozens of resources, etc, etc, etc.
Dozens of shade tree circuit designers sell their wares as kits on the web. There is a kit to do just about anything. Most are designed around PIC, AVR, etc type microcontrollers. Once you kit up with a dev kit for one of those technologies, you can do just about anything.
If you are looking for nicely packaged kits, you're kind of on your own. My projects tend to live in cast off cardboard boxes for a while until the right enclosure comes along. The packaging is always the hard part.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Try Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar magazine and try to dig up any old Byte magazines with his column in it.
I would recommend trying out MultiSim, it is an electronic circuit simulator with a large database of predefined parts, and the ability to add your own. You can download an evaluation version, good for a 30 day trial I think. This lets you play around with designing circuits, use virtual instruments to "measure" different parts of your circuit, and all without the risk of destroying your parts or starting a fire. As an accompanyment to this software, I second/third/whatever the suggestion of the Forrest Mims "Getting Started in Electronics" book, I still have my 20+ year old copy of the big green book, and it is one of the primary motivators that got me interested in the electronics that became my career.
Ignorance is Bliss -- And the Opposite is True -- Genius is Madness
I've always been a big synthesizer fan, especially the old analogs, but even though I bought a primer book on electric circuits, as well as a electrical project book for musicians, i never got around to doing anything. But I want to work with my son who is 12 and start out small until we can build an analog synthesizer. Any recommendations out there? We've talked about doing some circuit bending too once we get a handle on the basics.
Anyone remember the old SWTPC Tigersaurus kit?
http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&q=swtpc+tigersaurus&btnG=Search+Images
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
"Heathkits ... didn't really teach theory."
Not true at all. Anyone willing to dig in could learn a ton of theory from heathkits.
I grew up on a farm in the 68's and taught myself electronics and radio and TV repair before hitting hi school. Built a VTVM and Oscilloscope, and the manuals came with a theory section in the back. Also, they had cheap add on courses like "getting to know your vtvm" and "getting to know your scope" on basic electronics and tv repair.
See http://www.va3ep.net/Lab2nd.jpg
Seem to recall I was building a tube stereo amp from scratch in that pic.
When I got to hi school the e'lab teacher made me a proctor, and I spent all the theory time building more kits for the labs. Led to a pretty good career.
Fortunately robotics (and even ham radio) is bringing a few new people (kids and older) into it. Check out www.arrl.org and www.eham.net for info and review of some kits.
My concern is that within another few years, traditional components will not even be available and the hands on learning will stop. Hit tech will be all surface mount, made by robots in China, and nobody in North America will know how to do it and you toss it out when it breaks (we are almost there now).
How many people on this site know how to farm if they had to feed themselves?
Eric
www.va3ep.net
Ramsey Electronics has a decent range of kits covering all sorts of subjects and skill levels.
http://www.xgamestation.com/ - the book has all the info you will need to get started understanding the theory and putting it to use making something fun.
http://www.paia.com/proddetail.asp?prod=9505KFPA
I didn't know squat about electronics before making my own theremin with this kit. It shows you exactly how everything is laid out. It doesn't exactly show you the why, but in putting something like this together you kind of get the idea. Between the kit and internet I was able to figure out how to modify mine to take a 6ft home-made antenna and run on batteries, so.
I had one of those Radio Shack style kits. I also had a more advanced 300-in-1 kit which used a breadboard and loose components in almost all cases instead of the fixed terminal layout of the other kits. I still have it, and all the components, and I'm strongly considering experimenting with it some more - and of course it is useful for absolutely any experimentation.
It came with a wide range of components including about ten different IC chips. Something like that still has all the basics of the simpler kits but gives you a lot more flexibility later on. Might be of interest to people.
Afraid I don't have it with me though so I can't check the manufacturer. I do know that it was bought about twelve years ago from my local radio shack style shop in the UK.
It is a called a logic design course at an engineering college.
I suggest a POV toy: http://www.ladyada.net/make/minipov3/index.html
If you're looking for micro controller type projects, do searches for college projects and check out TI or PIC.
There is a PIC starter kit that comes with sample code and a lot of starter information.
http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=1406&dDocName=en010053
Also, there are some TI DSP starter kits out there.
http://www.ti-estore.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=dStartKit
All of this stuff comes with a lot of learning material from the manufacturer and people who work closely with the manufacturer.
Depending on your math level, some college courses with a lab component wouldn't hurt.
In Germany, the best kits are or at least were made by Busch:
http://www.busch-model.com/karina/katalog/d/530.htm
I had them when I was 10-12 years old, and they really explained all the principles. They also allowed for an immense number of circuits. From simple light-switches, over AM-radios to proximity detectors and the like.
They even have a computer kit:
http://www.busch-model.com/karina/katalog/d/2188.htm
It teaches you from the ground up how computers work.
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
But a much, much better option is to buy this starter kit and learn the hot new Arduino instead of the aging Basic Stamp. You'll need to start a junk drawer of components, including resistor assortment like these four kits. Local Amateur Radio HamFests and eBay are both good places to fill out your junk box.
Some good resources:
o The Arduino Home Page
o Peter Anderson's Arduino page (the whole site is great, and most can be adapted to the Arduino)
o Sparkfun Tutorials (and don't miss out on their store that has all the good stuff)
o The Electronic Goldmine is a great resource for odd surplus electronics.
How about building analog synthesizer modules? Paia and Blacet Research sell complete analog synthesizer module kits with comprehensive instructions, including theory of operation. Paia sells a couple of techno-ambient ready synthesizers with MIDI, as well as a theremin and other audio processing kits. John Blacet has a fine line of compact analog modules that have been well-used for music production and audio processing. It's a good learning experience soldering and assembling their kits, but even greater charge when you get that fine analog sound out of your handiwork . Techno ambient from my Blacet tower can be heard on the Eurock Live! Podcast.
I just finished building a fairly complex Ramsey kit and was impressed by their level of detail. They even explain the circuit theory where it's important to understand how the thing works. While it lacks the professional fit and finish of Heathkit, it's a good first-kit experience for adults, and they have a huge variety of applications.
I have also built Ten-Tec and Elecraft kits. I wasn't too impressed with Ten-Tec - the circuit board had a fabrication error that I had to troubleshoot and figure out myself. Elecraft seems to be the new gold standard in ham kits. Their manuals are excellent and the equipment is top-notch. (Can't wait to get my hands on a K3)
You'd make an audio amplifier, or an AM radio, or a Morse code generator, etc.
I was about 12 at the time, but fairly bright, and I got a LOT out of it. Too bad it didn't stick...
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
I used the Electronics Learning Lab and the Electronics Sensor Lab from radio Shack. You can check out the labs here and here to see exactly what you will be learning before deciding whether or not to purchase them.
Well Best way to learn is to simple pick up some books on the subject.
Some books I would recomend are,
Principles Of Electric Circuits (conventional current) Seventh Edition or higher. ISBN 0-13-098576-7 . This will give you the basics for Ohms law , and RC and RL circuits , and passive filters
Electronic Devices Conventional current version Seventh Edition.
ISBN 0-13-114080-9
This book will give you the fudenmentals for all your basic electronics components , diodes , transistor BJT and mosfets. Along with opamps voltage vegulators and power amplifier circuits.
Electronic Communication Systems 2nd edition (blake)
not sure of the ISBN on this one
ISBN-13:978-0-7668-2684-7
ISBN-10:0-7668-2684-8
This book is all about Basic Radio theroy, it will give you the basics on Transmitter , Receivers , AM and FM modulation , Digitial modulation like QAM , FSK , PSK ,Transmission line theroy , etc (general a great text book)
Your should also get a math text book of somekind for refrence in regards to Complex numbers etc. and a good phyisics text book is also great to have by your side.
Last book you might need is a Digital text book, I say might need since I have personly never refrenced my digital text yet.. you general end up using a spec sheet and a pin out for anything Digital. But if you can find one that covers stuff like Microprocessors , microcontrollers , Digital communcation protocals etc then grab one , but i'm betting online resources might be acceptible in this regard.
The last book you might want is The ARRL Handbook for Radio Communications 2008. Even if you don't ever plan to mess around in radio there is a bunch of great troubleshooting information in there for trouble shooting unintended RF i.e. self ossilcation in a Power op-amp. Basiclly covers how to fix the near occult like black magic that goes into getting high frequency anything to work right)
I would recommend 2 links as a starting point for learning electronics. The first is an open book project that explains the theory behind just everything you could want to know about electronics:
http://www.openbookproject.net//electricCircuits/
The second link is a web based java program with which you can test out the various theories in that book:
http://www.falstad.com/circuit/index.html
The java program isn't real world, and isn't in the same ballpark as spice, however, it does have a lot of circuits already layed out that illustrated the concepts. It also has a visual oscilloscope for tracing various components and see how they respond to changes in current, voltage, etc.
This got me farther than anything else I have tried.
First off they do put more effort into testing of equipment, we NEVER get anything that is DOA, with the exception of items clearly damaged in shipping. Much better than the 3-5% that seems to be the norm. But that is not the main reason for the cost.
1) Insurance companies have what is called 'allowables' for items, they are the ones that determine the cost of items, not the companies that sell them.
1 Ex.) You go to a store to get a CPAP or wheelchair to be purchased thru your insurance. That store asks the insurance company for X dollars (normally MSRP), the insurance company promptly disregards that number and pays the store Y dollars, where Y is the insurance predetermined company's allowable amount for that item. (Which is based on a broad classification for item, which means that it is in the companies best interest to sell the cheapest product possible, they get the same amount of money no matter what it costs them.)
2) All insurance companies use 'Medicare Standard' as the basis for their guidelines. This means that Medicare determines the cost, qualification, limitations, etc. for all mainstream medical goods and services.
3) Medical companies, hospitals, etc. then lobby to Medicare to make sure that the allowables are set to a very high price, and that qualification is easy. Also, since everything is based on the rules set by one government agency they are not subject to things like competition and do not change easily. So costs get set to a already high amount. 5 years when the production cost of item drops to 1/5th of what it was before, they will still be paying the same amount that they did before.
This post is also a response to 'What is wrong with the health industry in the US?'
I try to mix it up a bit. Plenty of blinking but also C code, analog and digital design You can check out the kits at http://www.adafruit.com/ or if you want to -really- DIY you can just make them from the OS plans at http://www.ladyada.net/
For example, http://www.ladyada.net/make/mintyboost/process.html
Lots of Software/Computer Geeks also like Arduino-based kits and projects because you can skip straight to building stuff instead of learning Ohms Law http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino
http://www.circuitcellar.com/ - Check out the archives for tons of interesting projects. These are not kits, but most articles are well written and provide the necessary information to build the project.
The TV I had growing up was, in fact, a Heathkit 27" kit TV, in the large cabinet that had bookshelves under it. It rocked :)
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
Department of Energy Handbooks (specifically 1011 / 1013 / 1014 series): http://www.hss.energy.gov/NuclearSafety/techstds/standard/standard.html
That's about as 'just the facts' as you can get, which comes in handy from an adult learning / slashdot-oriented user perspective.
Hope this helps...
this sig was brought to you by the letter
I've had a lot of fun building their kits, and they've got projects all the way from goofy beginner stuff up to some pretty neat advanced builds.
To be fair, though, I don't believe they're much better about explaining the electronic wizardry than the kits designed for kids.
If you want to learn more about electronic design, one of the best methods would be to pick something you're interested in building and get involved with the existing online community. Since the designs on these sites are open and constantly being tweaked, you can jump in and get your hands dirty.
For instance, if you play guitar, check out the DIY Stomp Boxes page.
If you're a freak like me for decorating at Halloween, build your own electronic Halloween projects. I built a Velleman "light organ" from a kit I found on that page, and built the electronic flicker bulb project from schematics.
Just remember not to get frustrated. You learn a lot more when things go WRONG than when they go right!
Buy them anyways, because if your trying to impress slashdotters or looking for help you might as well forget about learning electronics. \n
Why are you worried about the age recommendation and appearence question? The snap kits in question are an excellent way to learn and are quite expansive. The first labs I used had something extremely similar, and that was a 'professional' set. The only arguments I have against the sets you are talking about is the price and what happens when you get over a couple megahertz. They are way to expensive and that is a big setback to education today. You may also find niches and secrets and hardware hacks with sets like that. New resources some may not know about. \n
I'm 35, and have worked with electronics since I was 13. I still play with legos :). If you really 'enjoy' something every opportunity is a unique chance to learn something exciting. It's a good thing to keep up with something that helps me touch roots with my childhood. For you its never to late to start. Have fun.
If you're a software person I can strongly recommend the Atmel STK-500 microcontroller development board. There's great Linux support for the development tools (using the gcc toolchain), so you can develop the software end of things in your favorite environment, and the microcontrollers can run just fine with internal clocks, so the only external connections you need are Vcc (Usually 2, 3 or 4 batteries) and ground.
With a microcontroller and the knowledge that you have to put a resistor in most places to limit the current flow, you don't have to know much more than Ohm's law, Current = Voltage / Resistance and that you can't pull more than about .1 amps (current, aka 100 milliamps) off of a microcontroller pin to do a lot of cool stuff.
That and one of your favorite "download our board layout software and order custom boards from it", ExpressPCB's software works fine under Linux, and you can be making your own kits fairly soon.
In fact, I just made an order of a few PCB boards to give me some basic break-out for an ATMega16 with a real-time clock. Minimum order is going to leave me with a few extra boards, and I can probably scrape together a spare LCD or two and share some code, if you're near Petaluma California drop me an email (I'm easy to find on the web) and I'll see if I've got parts to share.
If the $80 for the STK-500 is too much, there are even plans out there for a parallel port programmer that should work with the boards I just ordered. And, yes, I'll be putting full project details out there as this particular device goes forward, since this is the first hardware I've done that doesn't have a client.
In addition to "Getting Started in Electronics" mentioned above, check out Ward Silver's "Hands-on Radio Experiments" -- a collection of several years of his beginning electronics articles published in QST magazine. QST also sells a parts kit to go with the series, and most of the circuits can be easily built on a small Radio Shack breadboard. Unlike most texts that give you some math and maybe a demonstration circuit to build, Ward will explain the math, and lead you through several experiments with each circuit.
http://www.arrl.org/catalog/index.php3?category=Circuit+Design
This probably isn't quite the direction you are looking to go in, but I just took an electronics class geared towards physicists, and we used Horowitz and Hill's "The Art of Electronics" lab manual: http://product.half.ebay.com/Student-Manual-for-the-Art-of-Electronics_W0QQtgZinfoQQprZ195858
It starts you on analog electronics and then once you have built the transistor, it brings you up to date with the digital age. The only problem is the lack of a kit form, although most of the parts for the first half can be purchased at a Radiosuck. Good luck!
Whoops. Meant to say that the ExpressPCB software works fine under Linux using WINE.
Sorry.
I am surprised that no one has suggested talking to your local ham radio operators. Before all the computers and surface mount products from Asia, these were the people with the knowledge to teach and build electronics from scratch.
The ARRL Handbook is still one of the best books on electronics and theory for the non-engineer.
Google for ARRL. Then find the local ham radio organization.
It depends on how serious you are.
But you will also need some electronic instruments. Minimally, you will need some kind of volt-ohm meter. Ideally, you should have some kind of oscilloscope.
Good luck,
Electrical Engineer
If you want to learn electronics then start with Basic Electricity. That is the foundation.
A good book is: U.S. Navy Basic Electricity available at Barnes and Noble. Fundamentals through synchros and servos. It will also teach you safe practices which is essential. Then get a bread board, power supply, meter, some parts and build the circuits.
at your local community college. Will cost you $100 (depending on your location)and be well worth it. A basic electronics class will be mostly theory and book work 90% study 10% lab. You really won't grasp it without some education.
With this, then get a book with some schematics that interest you and buy the breadboards and components online.
If you want to learn more, depending on your interests; analog or digital, take more advanced classes.
Most community colleges have night classes and can be 1 hr 3-4 times a week or 3 hours once a week.
Download a copy of CircuitMaker 2000 http://www.csd.uoc.gr/~hy120/01f/cm2000.zip. Browse the Navy NEETS modules and play with the circuits in CircuitMaker. You will learn plenty.
Death is life's great reward. R. Hoek
This is probably a dumb question, but hasn't someone developed some kind of program to simulate electronic circuits constructed from virtual components, as well as virtual representations of tools commonly used to debug and test them (oscilloscope, voltmeter, etc...) similar to some of those virtual audio patching apps, where you connect software representations of effects modulators to each other via wiring onscreen?
8==8 Bones 8==8
It's been 20-25 years now, but I know much of what I learned about basic electronics concepts I picked up when I was in grade school studying to get a ham radio license. I never finished with the morse code end so never actually got one but I remember reading through everything I needed on the other side and that has really helped me understand things for just about every other electronics project I've ever worked on.
I just discovered this yesterday. It's an online circuit simulator with a number of different tutorials illustrating circuit principles and component behaviour. You can modify the sample circuits or create your own using a variety of active or passive components. Even has the ability to create "scope traces" at probe points, and shows in real time current, voltage, power, and other pertinent data for whatever you are pointing at.
It's not Spice, but it's quite functional as a learning tool.
http://falstad.com.nyud.net/circuit
In Soviet Russia a beowulf cluster of these things imagines you welcoming your new, neural-network overlords.
I highly recommend getting a copy of the Student Manual for The Art of Electronics by Hayes and Horowitz:
http://frank.harvard.edu/aoe/sm/index.htm
Good luck!
Seriously.
If you acquire a 80s or 90s game that needs some love and attention, you will learn more about electronics theory and repair than you might think, as you work through board issues, game wiring, et al.
Very good for people w/good manual dexterity.
- litz
I hate to be the one to say this, I hope I'm not the first. I don't mean for this to sound insulting, but troll me up if you must.
Ultimately, "kits" for learning are aimed at children because children are presumed to be unable to learn things on their own. Either they can't drive to the required resources, don't have any way of locating those resources, or cannot be trusted to learn in a safe manner.
When it comes to adults, you're supposed to be beyond such problems. You can drive to buy a book. You can ask someone for help, and you can hire a professional or a friend to teach you. But most of all, you can simply read.
You're going to have to loarn teh same things as that eight-year-old, with or without the kits. Start with two wires, a battery, and a lightbulb. Add a switch. Add a fuse. You'll find that it'll take you a week to add the fuse -- because you'll have to learn about resistance for the fuse to do anything at all. But you can read, and have the whole Internet to teach you about resistance -- also your local hardware store, by the way.
But ultimately, as an adult, you know one very important thing: electricity is dangerous. So when you plug in your lightbulb, you'll start with a battery. And when you plug it into the wall outlet, you'll plan ahead for the bulb to explode, the wall to catch fire, and yourself to get electrocuted. So you'll place the bulb inside a cardboard box, have a fire extinguisher handy, know where your home's fuse box is located, and you'll wear rubber gloves.
It's that simple. You don't need no stinkin' kit. Just do it. Play. Read. Then play again.
BOfH customized Cattle Prod !!!
Don't leave Mission Control without it!
Great for LARTing, it's also the gift that keeps on giving.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Things that have caught my eye include...
1) The http://www.tubedepot.com/diy-k-16ls.html 16W stereo tube amplifier kit. There's nothing like thermionics to get a gut feel for how electronics works. As a bonus - you will actually get something you might want to use for your effort.
2) The Spartan3E starter kit seemed to me to be good value in FPGA toys: http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail?name=122-1536-ND
3) silabs have some nice mixed-signal MCUs for analog dorking around. 8051 instruction set and a form factor that you can actually solder to something: http://www.silabs.com/tgwWebApp/public/web_content/products/Microcontrollers/en/mcu_developmenttools.htm
Nullius in verba
Reminds me of something I did in my mid teens, I had two (ok, so one was my little brothers, but he had no real interest in it) of those style of kits. A 150 in one and 200 in one. I used the 200 in one to build an AM transmitter that when you pressed down this key it would transmit a tone on whatever frequency you had the transmitter tuned to. It covered the whole AM spectrum quite well but the range was quite limited, probably no more than 200 feet. I then used a chunk of 3.5mm audio cable I had laying around and plugged the functional end into my sound card's output, and stripped the wires. Took the two + wires, wrapped them together and probed around on the board with my + and - wires for a means of pushing audio through instead of that less exciting DOOP noise. Success, I left it hooked up and played a few mp3's finding the quality of audio to be fairly decent considering it was on AM. Then came my first problem. There was a popping noise from inside my computer, and music stopped being heard. Turns out I blew a capacitor on the old ISA SB 16. I rebooted the computer and to my surprise, the card still worked fine after that. No explanation as to -why-, but even today it still works. I used my limited knowledge to decide to put resistors between the audio input and the line coming from my sound card, worked most excellent after that. I then decided I wanted more range and tried to build an amplifier out of the 150 kit, but nothing fruitful ever came out of that. I think I'm going to retry sometime soon :)
Check out the articles on this sight.
It is all slanted toward audio, but some excellent coverage of different amplifier classes, discrete component AMPS and op-amps.
sound.westhost.com
He also offers printed circuit boards for most of his projects, but I have found that you can breadboard most of them with satisfactory results if you just want to experiment.
Google for the name of the equipment, if it's a frequent/known problem you'll find repair instructions. BTW almost half of the salvaged stuff was repaired by replacing leaky/bulgy capacitors.
Touchscreen OLED development kits
If you're into those types of kits, check out the TouchShield http://www.liquidware.com/products/show/TS/TouchShield+Stealth It's called a shield because it snaps on top of a popular electronics development platform called the Arduino http://www.arduino.cc/
Portable Game Development
It's wicked easy to code on them based on the games people are already creating. Josh over at twilightedge made this cute game over at, http://www.twilightedge.com/arduino/neko/
Vacuum tube guitar amps, anyone? There's a thriving community that includes not only kits but community driven, open source design of new amps as well as groups that clone the classics.
I highly recommend the AX84 community, with its thriving forum, good starter docs, and excellent users, There's a lot more docs on the way, and a ton of collective wisdom. You can learn a lot of low level electronic theory and practice there. There are other great communities including 18watt.com and solid state forums out there for effects, etc. There are a bunch of computer geeks and other EEs and similar types at AX84, and in the lounge anything is fair game, including topics such as htis one-- which has come up before!
http://www.ax84.com/ - Tell 'em Harrison Ford Prefect sent ya.
Finally, the USN NEETS series mentioned in another response gets a lot of traction at AX84 as well.
http://www.gssteched.com/
Give microcontrollers a try. The Parallax Basic stamp kits make it really easy to get started. good examples in available books covering lots of different topics. Lots of examples around the 'net too. http://www.parallax.com/
I learned how to build & troubleshoot circuits using the Electronics Learning Lab from Radio Shack, but I have also taught other people electronics using this same lab. The lab guides provide a high level overview of what you're doing and how the circuit works (suitable for kids), as well as an in-depth explanation that'll satisfy an Electrical Engineer.
http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102913
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Rather than buying resistors and capacitors in simple 1-10-100 values, look into the 'E' series of preferred number values.
Preferred numbers exist to make scaling designs easier and to reduce the error when rounding from 'the value required by the design equations' to 'what I have in inventory'. The roughest official series of preferred numbers for electrical components is called E6: 10, 15, 22, 33, 47, 68. The series jumps up one order of magnitude every six steps, hence the '6' in 'E6'.
Each value in E6 is about 150% of the previous one, which means you can scale a design up or down 50% simply by shifting all the component values one place right or left on the scale. There are similar scales for E12, E24, E48, E96, and E192, each of which has twice as many values as the previous one, and offers twice as fine a grain of scaling potential. Here's a nice reference chart.
The maximum rounding error between any random number from 10 to 100 and the nearest E6 value is about 20%. E12 has a maximum rounding error of about 10%, E24 clamps the error to about 5%, etc.
If you start off buying parts from the unofficial 'E3' scale -- 10, 22, and 47 -- you can get within 10% of any multiple-of-ten value with at most three components: 10, 22, 32(10+22), 42(10+10+22), 47, 57(10+47), 69(22+47), 79(10+22+47), 91(22+22+47). To get closer than 10%, you can add (at most three) components from the next order of magnitude down.
The E series also give you a nice, predefined wishlist for future component purchases. Once you have five or six decades (orders of magnitude) of E3 values in your inventory, you can start filling the gaps with E6 values (15, 33, 68). Then you can move on to the E12 and E24 values if you really want to get serious about it. Note that values from the E24 scale don't carry over to the E48 scale (150 vs 147, 120 vs 121, etc), but I seriously doubt that the issue will ever arise for the average hobbyist.
Tom Duncan wrote a series of three excellent books:
Adventures with Electronics, Adventures with Micro-Electronics, and Adventures with Digital-Electronics.
The projects are made on a breadboard, so you have great flexibility when you want to expand on the ideas in the book and build your own circuits. After each project there is a list of suggestions and variations.
There's a component list at the end of the book, so you can buy all the bits yourself (and a few extra for your own more ambitious projects after working through the book)
Parallax has an excellent set of products including sensors, actuators and controller that go along with well writing documentation and training manuals. http://www.parallax.com/
There was similar thread few weeks ago realted to books about electronics. I have tried to complie all links for future reference
Electronics threads
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/06/2333256
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/20/1327207
Paper books websites
http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-Inventors-Paul-Scherz/dp/0070580782 +++
http://www.amazon.com/Bebop-Boolean-Boogie-Unconventional-Electronics/dp/0750675438/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210145164&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Robot-Builders-Bonanza-Tab-Electronics/dp/0071362967
http://pragprog.com/titles/ctelec/a-peek-at-computer-electronics
http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Electronics-Forrest-Mims/dp/0945053282
Online books websites
http://www.phy.davidson.edu/instrumentation/NEETS.htm
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-002Spring-2007/CourseHome/index.htm
http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/
http://www.hiviz.com/
http://openbookproject.net/electricCircuits/
Hardware kits websites
http://www.smileymicros.com/
http://www.arduino.cc/
http://ladyada.net/learn/arduino/
http://openbookproject.net/electricCircuits/
http://www.adafruit.com/
http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=68
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/Products/tools_card.asp?tool_id=2735
http://www.nerdkits.com/
http://www.electronickits.com/
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php
http://www.quasarelectronics.com/epl200.htm
http://www.elenco.com/prolabs.htm
http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PICAXE
http://www.phanderson.com/picaxe/picaxe.html
http://www.makingthings.com/products/KIT-MAKE-CTRL
http://www.parallax.com
http://www.xgamestation.com/
http://www.ramseyelectronics.com/
Software websites
http://www.avrfreaks.net/?module=FreaksTools&func=viewItem&item_id=145
http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/index.jsp
How to websites
http://www.curiousinventor.com/guides/How_To_Solder
http://www.curiousinventor.com/guides/Surface_Mount_Soldering/101
http://tangentsoft.net/audio/
http://www.electronics-lab.com/index.html
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/hdr.php?p=tutorials
http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/
http://www.embedds.com/
Electronic parts websites
http://digikey.com/
http://www.vellemanusa.com/us/enu/engine.php
http://www.bgmicro.com/
Online Forums websites
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/LTspice/?v=1&t=directory&ch=web&pub=groups&sec=dir&slk=1
Various websites
http://www.arrl.org/
http://www.makezine.com/
http://www.kpsec.freeuk.com/index.htm
Build a single ended guitar amp. It's not exactly a kit but it's easy to do and has a good community around it.
You'll need a Hammond 125DSE output transformer (from RadioDaze), a Hammond 260-0-260 power transformer (from RadioDaze), a Valve Junior double turret board from Watts Tube Audio, a Valve Junior component kit of your choice from Watts Tube Audio, and a Valve Junior chassis kit from Watts Tube Audio. You also want a metal chassis (WTA has these), some tools, a switch (WTA), a fuse holder and fuse (WTA) to put in line with the mains power, and a socket for the power cord.
Head over to SEwatt.com and ask for help. Check out this PDF to learn about all the parts:
http://www.s2amps.com/docs/vj_kit_inst.pdf
One thing you can do is just buy a Valve Junior head or combo for $120 and pull the board, get the WTA board and component set and build it, throw it into the existing amp; though if you really want to do a guitar amp, you want the Hammond 125DSE or ESE (ESE has more headroom, DSE will get you more distortion). In my case, I've wound up designing and building my own amps; but my VJ rebuild has a 6V6, a bias pot, an input filter to correct DC offset, and I'm adding a Baxandall tone stack.
Note that if you scratch build, you can hit PPwatt and ask about Fender 5D8 or 5E3 amps...
http://www.sewatt.com/
http://www.ppwatt.com/
http://forums.epiphone.com/
http://www.wattstubeaudio.com/
http://www.s2amps.com/docs/vj_kit_inst.pdf
http://forums.epiphone.com/Default.aspx?g=posts&t=7
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Hello, You might want to check out the NI "ELVIS". It's not cheap, but would provide an awesome platform to experiment with and learn about electronics. It is complete with built-in instrumentation and even integrates nicely with circuit simulation (Multisim) software. NI ELVIS II: http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/205425
MegaSquirt is a DIY electronic fuel injection (EFI) kit. This part is for the controller and they have links and plans on how to build the hardware too. Once I manage to build a transmission that can handle the power of my 458ci big block Chevy (single carb), I want to see about building one of these, only using a tunnel ram intake. I should finally be able to get the MPG below 9!
I drank what? -- Socrates
The Forrest Mims books are a great starter -- grab yourself a copy of "Getting Started in Electronics" to start with. RadioShack should have that one.
I'm also somewhat surprised that nobody's mentioned The Art of Electronics by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill. It's pretty much the standard reference work, and a lot of electronics design courses use it as the primary course textbook. It covers damn close to everything you need to know. Bit on the expensive side though, unless you can get a used copy.
Look for the Babani Publishing books too, they usually sell for a few quid on Amazon. Worth every penny - they're basically little pocket books that cover one subject (e.g. oscillators, filter circuits, etc) and cover it in some depth but without the mathematical baggage of Horowitz and Hill.
Start by learning Ohm's Law! V=IR, P=IV and the reciprocals. They're tremendously useful and state the relationship between voltage, current, resistance and power (Watts).
OK, now we move onto tools... Get yourself a decent multimeter - don't go overboard and spend $300 on a top-end Fluke, you don't need it. A $20 corner-shop digital multimeter will do fine. Just keep the battery charged up, they tend to drift when the battery starts to drain. Needless to say, the better ones don't do that :)
You'll also want a solderless breadboard and a half decent 5V power supply. The little switch-mode "universal" supplies are usually pretty good, Maplin have one that does 5V (among other voltages) on sale for £9 at the moment.
Components-wise, get yourself a selection of resistors, capacitors and transistors. FastComponents are worth a look if you're in the UK, they've got capacitor kits, crystals, some ICs, stripboard... Resistor packs can be had for not much money, you want a basic E12 kit, preferably consisting of 0.25W metal-film resistors, and 100 of each value. Expect to pay about £40 (there's a company called Dannell Electronics -- again UK based -- that sell these on eBay for a bit less). Bear in mind that it's sometimes cheaper -- especially with Farnell -- to buy the individual resistors than the overpriced "E12 Resistor Kit".
Suppliers... Well, there's FastComponents, Dannell, Bowood Electronics and the like in the 'small guys' category. These places tend not to have a very wide range of parts, but are often ridiculously cheap. They're usually run by people who actually know a bit about electronics, so they might be able to offer suggestions as to what you need.
Next you have the big guys -- CPC, Farnell, Maplin and RS. CPC and Farnell are basically the same company -- CPC have historically been a spares supplier and don't really do raw parts, whereas Farnell stray more to the raw components side of the line. Prices are reasonable, but not great. Rapid Electronics are worth a look - cheaper than Farnell, but I've never ordered from them. YMMV.
If you're in the USA? DigiKey rock (I've ordered from them a few times), and there's also Mouser and one other company whose name escapes me at the moment... Also search for BG Micro, they're a surplus supplier and often have some pretty good deals on odd parts.
Surplus suppliers are the 'odds and end shops' of the electronics hobby community. There used to be Greenweld, Mainline and a few others on this side of the pond; Greenweld has gone "Innovations Catalogue" and no longer sell components, and Mainline's warehouse burned down. The latter have risen from the ashes and now sell primarily on eBay UK.
Surplus kit is what it is -- sometimes you see fantastic bargains on things like graphics LCDs that normally sell new for £50-£100, but usually hit the surplus market for far less. YMMV though, some stuff is new-old-stock and generally quite nice, other things are pulled from broken equipment. Yet more stuff is cheap because it's weird
If I were a magazine publisher, I'd be worried by the fact that apparently no-one has suggested this!
Last time I looked there were still a number of good electronics publications on sale, and I mention them because that's how I got started, back in the day (70s). Back then there were a wide range of mags that covered a similarly wide range of abilities and interests; I expect that's narrowed now, but those that have survived tend to be the better, more in-depth ones. They often cover a lot of theory though of course you probably need to subscribe to a particular title for a year or more to get a complete picture. The advantage though is that they regularly publish interesting and sometimes unusual projects as well as supply the parts in kit form, so you can pick something to build that interests you and fill in the theory as you go.
One of my favourites in the 80s was "Elektor" which I believe was a Dutch publication, though in English. Very high quality production standards of both mag and kits, and they didn't have a patronising tone. Wide range of projects - audio, micros, test gear, RF etc. Lots of theory. No idea if it's still published. Others back then were "Wireless World" (sounded dated even then but excellent mag - emphasis on RF), "Electronics Today International" (ETI) - some great audio and early micro projects, though I'm pretty certain this one isn't published any more, "Practical Wireless" (also RF) and many others aimed more at beginners. Check out your local newsagent - even if you only picked up one they are (or were) a great source of information and suppliers just from the ads alone.
I was a submarine Electronics technician back when we were taught component level trouble shooting and repair. I have fixed gear when there were no repair parts on board because I understood the principals of electronics. I was taught a great deal of theory and gear specific knowledge by the Navy but I learned a great deal of practical, make it work, electronics from the cheep little radio shack books "Radio Shack Engineer's Mini Notebook" I see then on ebay now and then they're cheep, they will get you started with both simple theory and projects that promote success and further experimentation. This is not a kit but you can buy a breadboard and some wire and some cheap parts to get you started. Good luck!
I agree that the NEETS modules are a great resource, but seriously anyone who has ever tried to read them can tell you that you will fall asleep after chapter 1. Trust me, don't do it unless you have to. My suggestion is to start in small doses, NOT using the NEETS, use a site like: http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_1/index.html to get the basics down, I still use it as a refresher, and then if you feel you are ready for a more in-depth reading on the topic look in the associated NEETS module for the full-monty. Good luck!
Ramsey electronics www.ramseyelectronics.com has several excellent kits. The ones that I built have a full theory of operation and suggestions for additional modifications.
I had a lot of fun helping young adults get started learning about electronics with the Parallax kits. The WHAT IS A MICROPROCESSOR kit is a great place to begin. Explains in great detail what things are and how they interact in a system. Also teaches some entry level programming for the microprocessor. From there move into the SCRIBBLER or BoeBot kits, to put the hardware and processor into action with the skills you learned in the WHAT IS A MICROPROCESSOR kit. The kits are fairly inexpensive, and really build upon one another. Then work into the different sensors and their opperation and code to implement them, and the robotics components and their role and code in the system.
They are fun, inexpensive, and a great place to start for the novice.
"It seems that we are at the age where life stops giving us things, and starts taking them away..." Indiana Jones
Ah, nostalgia!
I used to have one of those 500-in-one thingies. It was great. I made every circuit and experimented with it until half the components burnt out.
However, I'd only want to get back into it now if someone showed me a simple way of getting my circuits to interact with my (Linux) computer via USB. I also have parallel, serial and PCI ports sitting there unused. Anyone?
...there is the age old game of Operation. Zzzzzztttt!
The http://www.arrickrobotics.com/ A-Robot is an excellent beginner's bot. It is rugged (can survive 10 years in a drawer and still function) gets you up and running quickly, and is expandable. A 12V, 2A power output, 3 spare RC servos, and a 40 pin I/O header (that takes an IDE cable) will let you play with electronics. Roger Arrick wrote "Robots for Dummies" that shows one project at a time how to breadboard a peripheral and code for it. Buy everything that's in the T1 kit, but don't get the BS2 - get the BS2e. $400.
The closest second for a beginner's bot is the BOE bot fromParallax. It's based on the same processor. The problem with the BOE bot is that when it breaks, it's dead. It's not really expandable like the A-Robot is. you would have to see the A-Robot (1 ft x 1ft) next to the BOE Bot (6in x 6in) to understand.
For less beginning, and more electronics, check out http://www.ere.co.th./ You are trading BASIC for assembly, and no longer have a beginner's book to guide you. You do have http://www.avrfreaks.net./ The really cool thing is all the peripherals on 16 pin headers, so you don't have to spend 3 days to get a stepper motor to spin. You will be able to bread-board parts too, with 16-pin headers on the boards.
A close second in this field would be the boards that accept Atmel STK-style headers. That's what I use when I'm not building a custom board. I'm too entrenched in 10 pin headers to go to 16 pin headers, though I made some 10-to-16-pin-adapter-boards.
Finally, you could get an AVR board like I use for my projects from http://www.geocities.com/mengjinsu. Meng's boards are great if you know how to stuff PCBs and solder them. I order them by the dozen. Get the ABR chips from http://www.digikey.com/ and the rest of your stuff from there or http://www.mouser.com./ Also, take a look at http://www.sparkfun.com/
Andy Out!
When I used to work for Tektronix they had testing software that could simulate circuitry. That was back in the 80s. Aren't there by now virtual electronics labs for PCs that let you wire up components on screen and see what happens? Seems like that would be a faster way to learn than by breadboarding or soldering.
When I was a kid I took two books out of the local library which changed my life forever. They're both by Tom Duncan, and they are titled 'Adventures with Electronics' and 'Adventures with Microelectronics'. ISBN numbers are 0719535549 and 0719536723. One uses a board called an s-Dec, the other a standard breadboard. You can still get the books from Amazon, and they're great for getting started with electronics. Highly recommended!
I bought the "tron.ix" kits and books 1 & 2 (http://www.gibsonteched.com/tronix12.html) from a local electronics retailer. I'm very happy with them.
I needed to learn about microcontrollers, and was advised to go with the AVR micros. These tutorials focus on the serious side of electronics, and do it in a light hearted manner. Well worth looking into.
Odd. Don't all the electronics kits (for kids or not) have accompanying schematic diagrams for everything you're assembling? Mine did, and I assumed they all did--0but I got it during the late 1980s, probably from Radio Shack. My parents taught me to ignore the point-to-point assembly instructions and instead look at the schematics.
http://outcampaign.org/
There is a very powerful free circuit simulation evaluation program available from spectrum-soft. If you go to www.tier-2-innovation.com you will find 10 electronic circuit kits that help you learn how to use microcap9, which is the circuit simulation program. The program essentialy provides you with all parts, instruments and power supplies to build and test circuits.
My grandfather, who was an electrical engineer, bought me a 200-in-1 kit when I was a kid, and I had a lot of fun with it. Some of the projects were a bit advanced for me, and I never understood how some of them worked even if I could assemble them, but it sure did encourage experimentation. You could do a lot with those things.
I also had a 150-in-1 and 300-in-1, but the 200-in-1 was my favorite by far.
One time I tried to test the remaining strength of the batteries by pressing a Duracell tester across the terminals they were connected to on the kit, and almost instantly burnt my fingers. Somehow the Duracell people thought it was a good idea to encourage people to short circuit their batteries with what was basically a bare strip of metal. Luckily we had an allo cactus in the house to treat it. So one way or another I guess you can't help but learn with a kit like that at your disposal.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
When I started fiddling with things electric I used to get switches, wiring, transformers and such from a family friend who happened to be an electrician. You can teach yourself some simple logic with the batteries, wire, switches and relays. If you want to get into the electronics and such for analog I'd suggest the Radio Amateurs Handbook (or whatever HAM operators are using these days) if you can find it. It takes you from basic circuitry up through powerful radio transmitters and even has some digital stuff too. There used to be thousand-page books full of circuitry and operational amplifier handbooks, phased-lock-loop handbooks, etc. easily found at your nearby campus bookstore or better yet, used book store. At various institutes of technology these are plentiful and intro course texts are available too. ;)) enjoy!
I'd recommend that you start out understanding Ohm's Law and bipolar transistor operation. You will find that transistor-based design is pretty simple and from there, the sky's the limit (actually the ends of the knowable universe are but you'll see!
Be as you would have the world become.
Be careful - as good as Mims' books and kits, he is a creationist, censored by Scientific American for his views regarding evolution. He must be trying to use the electronics as a back door to sneak religion into the classroom.
http://www.paia.com/
Good + Affordable multimeters, too.
I recall the particular distibution of experiments, including the UV light and cloud chamber. It was fun. Wished I saved it.
Over the last several years, the electronics program in the high schools here in Oslo, Norway fell apart. My nephew was left stranded without an educated teacher and was forced to instead study TCP/IP networking to complete his high school diploma. The worst part is, he and his classmates were still interested in electronics and needed a tutor. So I setup a study group with zero financial resources.
This was not a problem.
There is little point in electronics kits and trainers these days as the parts they provide lack focus and the process of building the projects is more for fun and less about learning how things work. There is a much better alternative.
Simulators!
You can purchase (or accidentally duplicate) a copy of either Eletronics Workbench from National Instruments or a copy of Proteus VSM and accomplish far more in a shorter time.
A proper adult level lab requires an Oscilloscope, logic probe, function generator, a/d board, multimeter, etc... these tools virtualize both all of these tools and are extremely powerful.
Also, given the cost of aquiring all the components for a proper lab is hard. As a proof of concept, I actually developed an entire 8080 compatible processor at a transistor level with memory and graphical display in Proteus VSM. This project was great since it allowed me to teach, by example all the concepts from power supply design to software development in a simulator at ZERO cost.
I highly recommend ignoring kits and lab tools and focussing instead on the theory which can all be learned visually in these simulators.
When you've learned to design something, you can design your own boards and have them prototyped by cheap services for $20 a pop and solder the parts down. If there's a flaw in the design, figure it out in the simulator. If it requires you to access motors and sensors, then you can get a multimeter and a logic analyzer, but you should be able to fake the problems in the simulators to sort out most problems.
Good luck with your education.
http://www.gibsonteched.com/etcprogram.html Underway, the only way Saturdays, Sundays, And Nights (SSN)