On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 7:04 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > I am trying to learn more about electronics and start doing > hardware projects. I have never been into model building or anything > similar, > so my construction skills are lacking. I understand a lot of things in > theory, > but practice still eludes me. >
To get a better background in electronics, I would highly recommend "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill. The long awaited and fully updated 3rd edition came out just last year and it is well worth the $80.00 price. As a person who has worked with electronics on and off since 1960, I can say it teaches electronics the way I wish I had been taught. It has a strong emphasis on practical applications and assumes only high school math. Some here may pooh-poo it, but to get started building useful electronic systems I would recommend the Arduino platform. Fully assembled processor boards are about $25.00 from reputable suppliers and have plenty of I/O pins to get you started. On some versions of the processor you can expand the I/O by adding "shields" which mate to headers on the processor board. All you need to do to is to plug the board into a USB port on your PC or Mac and download the free IDE. Both the hardware and software are open source so you can see exactly how they work under the covers if you want. A wide variety of libraries is also available (all free) and there is a lively user community. The programming language is a stripped-down version of C++ with a bunch of simple extensions to support analog and digital I/O. Once your code is working you can either continue to power the system through the USB port or run it stand-alone with a 9V battery or wall wart. I have built a GPSDO based on the design posted here by Lars Walenius a couple of years ago. It uses the Arduino Micro processor, which is nice because it has a second serial port. This lets it get serial data from the GPS and talk to the PC at the same time. I would be happy to post the schematics and code if you are interested. -- --Jim Harman _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
