Electronics Basics: Using a Breadboard
A breadboard is a rectangular plastic box filled with holes, which have contacts in which you can insert electronic components and wires. A breadboard is what you use to string together a temporary version [more…]
Soldering 101
Chances are you'll need to know how to solder sooner or later in your robot-building career. Soldering (perversely pronounced "soddering") involves a material called [more…]
Measuring Stuff with a Multimeter
A multimeter is an electronics testing device that, um, tests multiple things, including resistance, voltage, and current. Using certain multimeter models, you can test to be sure that components — such [more…]
Avoiding Electric Shocks
Your body is a delicate machine. Electric shocks, depending on certain conditions, can be fatal, even at relatively low voltages. What comes out of your wall outlet is deadly if you play around with it [more…]
Steps to Great Car-Audio Sound
It takes a lot to create a good car audio system. Here are six basic steps every car audio enthusiast should take on the path to great sound. [more…]
Turning Electricity On and Off
You've scrounged around your growing electronics bin and come up with wires to connect a circuit together and batteries to power the circuit. So how do you turn the power on and off? You use switches and [more…]
Getting into GPS
GPS stands for Global Positioning System. A special radio receiver measures the distance from your location to satellites that orbit the earth broadcasting radio signals. GPS can pinpoint your position [more…]
Circuitbuilding Projects: The Solderless Breadboard
Using a breadboard is one of the basic starting points for the design of many types of circuits and projects. Also known as a plugboard or prototyping board [more…]
What to Do When You Find a Geocache
Maybe you immediately stumbled on the geocache that you were looking for — or perhaps it took you a couple of painstaking hours, searching high and low to find a particularly devilishly hidden cache. It [more…]
Tuning in Ham Radio
Ham radio invokes a wide range of visions. Maybe you have a mental image of a ham radio operator (or ham) from a movie or newspaper article. But hams are a varied lot — from go-getter emergency communicators [more…]
Showing You My Etchings: Etching the Circuit Board
Creating the resist pattern on a new sheet of printed circuit board material really only gets your circuit board one third of the way done. For the next step, you need to etch that board to remove the [more…]
Splicing a Power Cord
Power cords get damaged from all sorts of things; over-enthusiastic weed-whacking or hedge-trimming, forgetting that the car's battery warmer was still plugged in, even being chewed up by dogs and rodents [more…]
Ten (Or So) Cool Electronics Testing Tool Tips
Okay, so you're ready to graduate to the electronics big time. But you can't do it alone. You need a laboratory full of impressive-looking gear with blinky lights, bright knobs, and spinning dials. You're [more…]
Protecting Electronic Components from Dreaded Static Discharge
You're not the only thing in your work area that could suffer from shocks. Static discharge (also referred to as electrostatic discharge; ESD) can damage your delicate electrical components. Static discharge [more…]
Advanced Car Audio Sound Quality Concepts
Although the four basic sound quality concepts (clarity, dynamic range, frequency response, and tonal balance) are the most fundamental to understand before purchasing a new car audio system, there are [more…]
Seven Circuitbuilding Secrets
Below are seven bits of wisdom aren't about specific circuitbuilding techniques, but generally apply to everything. They can help make and keep circuitbuilding an enjoyable activity that will continue [more…]
Building a Circuit Dead-Bug Style
With dead-bug style circuitbuilding, the integrated circuits (ICs) are all mounted upside down on the printed circuit (PC) board with most of their legs sticking up in the air! They look like a lot of [more…]
Operating Your Ham Radio in an Emergency
You hope it never happens, but what if worse comes to worst? All emergencies are different, of course, so a step-by-step procedure is not going to be very useful. Here are some solid principles to follow [more…]
Building Your Robot Safely
Compared to defusing bombs and walking tightropes, building robots is a safe endeavor. Still, there are some safety tips here that may come in handy.
In addition to the specific pointers included here, [more…]
Geocaching: The High-Tech Scavenger Hunt
When the U.S. government turned off GPS Selective Availability (SA) in May 2000, it was like magic. Suddenly civilian GPS receivers that were formerly accurate to about 300 feet were accurate to 30 feet [more…]
Selecting a Nonprogrammable Robot Kit
Why not just build your own robot buddy out of scrap parts lying around the garage? Building a robot from scratch is not the best place to start. To transform common household items into useful components [more…]
Delving into DX-ing
Pushing your station to make contacts over greater and greater distances (DX means distant stations) is the second oldest activity in all of ham radio. Somewhere out in the ether, a station is always just [more…]
Putting Your Television to Work
What's all the big fuss about over TiVo?
TiVo works as your robotic television manager, constantly scanning upcoming show listings to separate your favorites from the trash. It juggles the recordings to [more…]
Selecting a Location for Your Own Geocache
Just like in real estate or retail sales, location is everything when it comes to placing a geocache. After you select a container, figure out where to put it — or sometimes you find a perfect hiding place [more…]
Home Theater Basics: What's "Electronic Content?"
Grabbing music and video off the Internet probably isn't a new topic for you. But when you get right down to it, knowing a few high-level concepts about [more…]
