Tekgnosis

Title says it all. Very excited to go.

So I’ve taken a heads-first approach to learning electronics. And of course one of the skills I’ve been forced to reckon with is soldering. I had only done a few tiny jobs here and there over the years, and not very good jobs at that.

During my whole obsession getting into electronics and hardware I decided to invest in a good soldering station and tools, figuring there was a good chance I would be soldering very frequently as part of my new found passion. As it turns out, just because you have the fancy equipment does not mean you will have clean solder joints.

I had a few soldering projects that were successful, but in a very limited sense. I had watched videos online, but it just seemed when I went to do the same thing, my solder was not behaving as I had seen in the videos. I would move on when things randomly worked out (to a passable level) after aimlessly experimenting with various techniques and temperatures.

Today however I had a friend clue me onto the one aspect of soldering technique that I was missing. And that was it. Now it’s all magically working as expected and I am actually able to make real progress. I ordered a new AVR programmer, and prototype board, but had to solder header pins to a little break out conversion PCB to go from a 2×3 pin ICSP header to the classic 2×5 pin ICSP header. Works like magic, and the joints don’t look half bad. I’m finally looking forward to more soldering projects to come.

So I feel like I’ve done a lot recently to improve my understanding of electronics. I’ve certainly been busy; tinkering with random DC motors salvaged from junk and having to use Ohm’s law and a few other tricks to figure out how to create a variable speed control for them; creating a battery powered guitar amplifier from scratch; programming a microcontroller from a bread board.

Recently I would say I’ve just successfully completed one of, or maybe my most ambitious project yet. I’ve built a regulated TTL level (5v) circuit and put a microcontroller in a bread board. Complete with power and reset switch. I’ve been using ISP to program the micro over a serial connection from the computer. I decided to figure out how to use some shift registers that I purchased a while back (let you control 8 outputs with just one input from your micro). I’ve used two in tandem to control an array of 16 LEDs (4×4). To top it all off I randomly came across a cheap Atari 2600 joystick in a game store and decided to pick it up and see if I could figure out how to use it to control the LED array some how. I managed to get it to work so that the joystick can be used to move the lit LED around the array.

Although I spent one evening getting the TTL circuit up, and another two playing with the microcontroller and shift registers, the LED array and joystick implementation was all done in one evening. I’m starting to impress myself. Feels good to be able to grab a random electronic component and do some reverse engineering and hacking to bend it to my will.

This was all preliminary research into possibly making a sweet microcontroller powered LED belt… or something to that effect. At any rate, point is I am continuing to make great progress when the motivation is there.

Pictures from the project can be found here and a crappy video of the contraption in action can be found here.