Learning Electronics?

[Piper]

Does anyone have any recommendations for a place to buy just a basic electronics kit without Arduino/Raspberry Pi? For the book I picked up I have a shopping list of various resistors, diodes, transistors, ICs (555 timers and LM741 op-amps for now) and capacitors. And a breadboard or two. I picked up most of this from Fry's and the remainder from Radio Shack last night but ended up around $130. I'm searching Google and eBay for kits with most/all of thees goodies to see if that would have been a better way to go before I start hacking my toaster.

~Charlie

 

[Piper]

Well, there are web servers, and there are WEB SERVERS.

You can run some sort of simple web server on arduino.
http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/WebServer
But more than one client, or any real page, and it will likely run out of code space fast.

For the Pi, you can run Apache, SQL, PHP, and whatever else, and basically run a full website like this one.
BUT: Those all come with a lot of baggage.
So if all you want is to have your iPhone tweak the dosing schedule, it is hard to say which
would take longer to set up.

I have been working on a revised wifi interface for the RA utilizing ExtJS but I kind of set that off to the side a while back to focus on other things. I need to dig the code back out and revisit it though. In the grand scheme of things I wanted to use that as a base for another project that would pull and log data from the RA into a MySQL database along with other aspects of a tank. aka yet another tank tracker. My concern was that if the wifi module disconnected you would not have access to the data.

If we do end up putting something together with the Pi I would like the ability to run a solid web server and log data via a SQL database. That way if wifi does go out you should still have data being logged.

I'll take a look at that link and see if I can get a better understanding of what the wifi module is doing on the RA.

~Charlie

 

[Piper]

Piper, did u ever figure out your pull-up resistors question?

I used to build embedded control systems, designed my own electronics hardware & circuit boards & wrote firmware to control microcontrollers and microprocessors. So I can discuss circuit design well enough.

I was being somewhat silly with that question but it is one of the things that kind of sparked my interest. I wanted to be able to put the mental picture together when someone talks electronics like that. I'm close! The Dummies book I picked up is actually a collection of 4 or 5 smaller Dummies books. I get deeper into that area in book 2 I believe. Almost there I'm sure I will eventually have questions on circuit design that I can bug you with.

~Charlie

 

[denzil]

Does anyone have any recommendations for a place to buy just a basic electronics kit without Arduino/Raspberry Pi? For the book I picked up I have a shopping list of various resistors, diodes, transistors, ICs (555 timers and LM741 op-amps for now) and capacitors. And a breadboard or two. I picked up most of this from Fry's and the remainder from Radio Shack last night but ended up around $130. I'm searching Google and eBay for kits with most/all of thees goodies to see if that would have been a better way to go before I start hacking my toaster.

~Charlie

If you're looking to go local (at least local to me in the South Valley) there's Halted Specialities Company Electronics in Santa Clara (they also have one in Rohnert Park) and Anchor Electronics which is also in Santa Clara. There's also Jameco in Belmont as well. The only caveat to Jameco is that they only have a will call so you can't see inside their big warehouse.

There's also Sparkfun in Colorado who has some cool stuff as well.

These were the vendors we used when we created our senior project. It was definitely the most fun I ever had in college; yes, even more than those crazy parties that we had.

 

[rygh]

+1 on Jameco. Local, fast, cheap, lots of parts.
Fry's used to be good, but is really weak now for hobby parts.
I tend to find a lot on the robotic hobbyist sites as well.

One thing I have been messing with is Amazon cloud computers EC2
The "micro" version is fine for little things, and is free for a year.
I originally did it to set up a Minecraft server for the kid.
But I have been thinking of using it as the master controller as well.
The main limit is that you only have 760MB of memory or so.
But there are light webservers, SQL severs, and so on, so that should be fine.
Basically have simple clients query the master for instructions.

 

[denzil]

+1 on Jameco. Local, fast, cheap, lots of parts.
Fry's used to be good, but is really weak now for hobby parts.
I tend to find a lot on the robotic hobbyist sites as well.

One thing I have been messing with is Amazon cloud computers EC2
The "micro" version is fine for little things, and is free for a year.
I originally did it to set up a Minecraft server for the kid.
But I have been thinking of using it as the master controller as well.
The main limit is that you only have 760MB of memory or so.
But there are light webservers, SQL severs, and so on, so that should be fine.
Basically have simple clients query the master for instructions.

There are a lot of components of AWS that are free that are ongoing so long as you don't surpass the monthly bandwidth limit. Too bad EC2 isn't one of them.

http://aws.amazon.com/free/