Building Your Own Gadgets
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What many digital nerds like is to have all sorts of gadgets around the house that make or not their life easier. Things like bread toasters that print the face of Vader on each loaf of bread or annoy-them-all devices are not that useful but fun to have around.
But what digital nerds with a little spare time love is the sheer joy of DIY projects based on tested and mostly untested designs. In this article I will try to present some basics about building electronic projects using a DIY Design – Electronics Kit that offers for about $50 a kit with some electronic components and a breadboard to pin them onto, a manual with step by step schemes and in the package they also deliver the best way to spend some good quality time with the digital nerds best friend and that’s electronics.
Building Gadgets (Source: thinkgeek.com)
Since all readers of digital nerds are electronics passionate not all of them may have experienced the basics principles of electronic based equipments on their own. Even if, in the beginning you will mostly build ‘smoke generators’ as I like to name the circuits that burn once powered, you will eventually learn how the basic functions of all the electronics around us are designed and engineered.
What such kits offer is the opportunity that not many are granted during school of really playing with electronics. You start by understanding the fundamental principles that all electronics rely on, building a power supply for your future projects, calculate resistance, capacities and voltages as well as currents so that when you complete the assembly of your designs you will get something else out of them except smoke. If you are interested in such kits, you can also make your own kit as electronic parts stores are very popular these days and you can get all sorts of components at very low prices especially if you buy them in bulk.
Building Gadgets (Source: bigbadrobots.com)
What you are interested in are some resistors of different values, LEDs, capacitors, batteries or accumulators, photodiodes, wires, buttons and switches, 556 timers and some potentiometers as well as transistors even if the last parts are difficult to use for someone without any previous knowledge about how they work and where can they be used.
You can make your own kit, as said before, for less money than those that are out of the box but in order to do that you have to understand how the whole thing works in general so that you don’t buy useless components.
