Pancakes wrote:
I also keep a lot of resistors, diodes, capacitors, few inductors, transistors, LEDs, ribbons, headers, timers 555, op-amps, comparators, counters, XTAL crystals, ... you name it.
That was quite funny to read. You've just described the contents of the plastic boxes at my feet! For some reason I've got loads of 741 op amps as well. I was building small microphones a while ago and used them as amplifiers to connect the microphone to the PC's audio input. I must have bought a metric s**t load of them at the time.
Pancakes wrote:
I have a few bread boards (which I love).
Breadboards are a necessity when you solder like I do. I don't solder enough to get good at it. Very little of what I build will survive long enough top warrant soldering.
Pancakes wrote:
Honestly using a breadboard is my preferred way but its not fun when you start to deal with radio frequencies because of all the capacitance the tracks in the board cause. So I do not have much experience with RF because it is just more difficult for me.
Me neither. Can't say that I'm great at electronics. Anything outside digital design and very basic analogue circuits with op amps and transistors is a mystery to me.
Pancakes wrote:
The only thing I do not have is an oscilloscope! Yep, most of my stuff I just try to debug through various methods. I used to have an old CRT one but it finally broke on me.
I made the mistake of buying a handheld single channel one some years ago. Don't ask me why I bought a single channel scope - they're not much more use than a voltmeter to be honest.
Pancakes wrote:
I would also like to say if you think computer programming is hard then your in for a real challenge with electromagnetism!
I'll leave that to the clever people - just too much for me. I like my mathematics discrete.
Have you done anything with a FPGA? I've just started. Within three days I went from zero experience to having somebody else's 8080 design running on my board executing a small test program sitting an a ROM I had built with verilog - just reading switches and outputting their state to LEDs. I thought it would be much harder than it turned out to be. I'm now on a mission to get some processors designed and of course write an OS or two for them. Unfortunately the development board I have doesn't have too much I/O. I've got my eye on a
DE0-Nano board.
I bought an
Arduino starter kit as a present for someone who I'll help learn about electronics and programming. It was the first session yesterday and I wasn't sure if they would like it. They loved it! It comes with a little breadboard and loads of electrical components for the beginner who doesn't have those sorts of things at home. I actually might get one for myself as its a nice wee prototyping setup.