[Bop]

Hello,
I'm currently a high school student (junior) and was introduced to DIY electronics via this site. Now, since our school does not have a DIY-electronics club, I was just thinking of how wonderful it would be if someone could make one. Unfortunately, since there is neither teacher, club, nor student who has traveled very far on this road, I'm pretty much on my own.

That being said, I'd like to ask a few general questions that might have been asked some 60 pages before, which makes me very sorry.

Q1: I've read about the Hakko Soldering Iron Copy that is around $40. Since this club must be personally funded due to the school district lacking funds (a result from both the economic crisis and our school's purchase of a 64" LCD TV), I'd like to know what the best $(20+/-5) soldering iron is.

Q2: I'm currently a complete n00b with the exception of some light reading, though I am planning on doing as many projects as I can during this Winter Break. So far I have the CMOY, an Ipod LOD, and a Mini3/PA2V2 in mind, but I'm wondering sonically if the PA2V2 or the Mini3 could be considered superior to one another.

Q2.5: Because of the shortage of "audiophiles" and people seeking higher quality sound, it might be best for me to use some bait-and-switch tactics, so I would like to know how to learn of DIY electronics outside of Audio DIY. *Please keep projects within safe voltages. Do remember that we are talking about 14-17 year old students who tend to act immaturely.
**A competition in our Physics Olympics calls for an electrically powered car, with the requirements being: 9 volt batteries, LEDs, and speed. Our PO has high attendance rate and thus could be a good way to find potential members so long as I could find ways to build one. Online sources tend to go to the big cars that people drive. Help on that would be much appreciated.

Q3: I am also interested in designing simple circuits and projects. I surely don't have a degree in electrical engineering, but is there some source that might enlighten me a little? Or does knowledge from several projects allow one to mimic and amalgamate them to create something new as in programming?

Q4: Yes, I do need some curriculum aka a list of projects that I could offer per month, so if anyone has any suggestions, please do tell.

I do realize...now...that this thread might or should have been broken into several smaller threads, and that some of this information could be found with more searching, but I do hope that the people on the forum here (all more experienced than me) would give their advice. Thank you very much.

 

[Juaquin]

1) You might be able to pick up a used Weller adjustable (the orange one, I think WLC100?) for around that on eBay or something. Other than that it's pretty much just your typical firestarter at that price range.

2) I haven't heard either so I can't help

2.5) Arduino - HomePage paired with an RC car? What exactly do you need to do?

3) Arduino - HomePage and pick up a used copy of The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill. That book alone could pretty much get you through all lower-div undergrad courses.

4) Arduino playground - HomePage

Seriously, if you're interested in learning about modern electronics (beyond the audio stuff here on this site), start with the Arduino. It's powerful, easy to use, and there are billions of projects out there, tons of documentation. If you want to do something with it, there's a 98% chance someone has already done it and posted an excellent tutorial to help you if you get stuck.

The official Arduino is like $35, but you can find scaled down clones (with all the features of the original) for $18-25. Make sure to get one with USB to keep things simple (instead of having to buy an FTDI board/cable). Buy Freeduino Open Source Hardware or iDuino - Breadboardable Arduino Clone -=- Spiffie.org are good options.

 

[mugdecoffee]

Good luck with the club! It's a great idea and wish there was one where I went to high school. For a cheap soldering iron, I'm on my second Hakko Blue iron and they're solid. Not temperature adjustable or anything but it comes with an extra tip and desoldering braid and the tips don't burn up like Radioshack irons.

 

[Bop]

Thank you for the reply (and encouragement

)! I do very much appreciate it. I'll let you all know in maybe a few months how it's going, and maybe for more questions that will crop up later.

 

[diditmyself]

A3) Download and learn LTSpice. Like you said, mimic other projects and in a short while you can design your own (analog) electronic projects.

 

[Bop]

Just a quick question about the Art of Electronics by Paul Horowitz. Would the level of difficulty be too much for me if I have finished reading the NEETS mods online? This was brought up in one of the reviews on Amazon, but I'm rather curious.

 

[jezz]

For what it's worth, the Arduino isn't the end-all be-all of microcontrollers. Other options include Parallax' Basic Stamp, an Atmel ATmega series with an AVR ISP programmer, or the Beagle Board. I used to do a lot of things with the Lego Mindstorms kit running Java via Lejos and just using the parallel port on my computer. A lot of debugging can be removed when you're working from a known good computer

.

There are an assortment of fields with regards to electronics. DIY in this forum tends to range from meaning modifications to headphones and equipment to building audio circuits from the ground up. However, there is also a great deal out there for control systems for robots and devices, wireless communication via Bluetooth, and even DIY CPU design via soft-cores on FPGA's. Here are some of the projects or kits I've done or been interested in, as far as non-audiophile hardware goes.

1. Johnny Lee's Wiimote Experiments
2. Altoids Tin Speaker
3. An FPV Plane. This has the added benefit that you can make friends with a hobby shop owner and see if they'll sponsor you or help you.
4. Circuit Bending (not as educational, but can be very fun)
5. Video out of an MCU and the UzeBox, a DIY Game System
6. Pretty much anything at Instructables in the "Tech" and "Science" sections, like this fairly easy robot or a tiny little electronics Christmas card
7. SparkFun's DIY Oscilloscope kit
8. LadyAda's DIY Tube Clock Kit and TV-B-Gone
9. Xilinx Spartan-3A Eval Board for an extremely well-priced FPGA starter board

With the exception of LadyAda's Tube Clock, everything's within safe voltage levels. As for said tube clock, it could be fun for a few folks who want to start to understand HV systems; it only boosts up to 60V or so for the tube.

Of perhaps some relevance to you is Free Day at Sparkfun, where you can get $100 of free stuff from SparkFun.

Learning this stuff can be a challenge from the textbooks. I've always found them lacking in a lot of important areas or having expectations of some college level mathematics. I would suggest MIT's OpenCourseWare 6.002 on Circuits and Electronics over a textbook, but still the math can be tough. I might suggest Wikipedia for some of the material, just because the theory is usually pretty well described. When it comes to designing circuits, any of the Spice variants can be very useful, but honestly a breadboard and some resistors might suit your needs better without requiring the use of a simulator and all the quirks that come with them.

As for Q2.5, bait-and-switch... My hunch is that not only would it be tough to convert folks to audiophiles, but more than that if you're calling yourself the "DIY electronics" club, then you cannot by definition limit yourself to the projects mentioned around here.

Finally, I don't know if you want to look at the software side of DIY electronics. It's potentially less destructive and cheaper to get into, especially with something like the UzeBox out there. There is a great deal of knowledge available on the internet for software as well, particularly in the StackOverflow community. That's fairly digital though.

There's lots to do in each, but honestly I'd suggest finding something you want to fiddle with and go with it. Home automation (automatic coffee in the morning? It's never too early to get addicted...), robots, lasers, annoying your roommate (parents?), etc..

And in case no one's said it to you yet, sorry 'bout your wallet.

EDIT: Ah, forgot about the soldering station. Find yourself a firestarter from rat shack for $10 or whatever and then perhaps build this Instructable, linked from Make.

 

[Juaquin]

The Art of Electronics is a pretty friendly book. It's not a textbook, really. More like a reference and overview with a lot of practical designs and examples of good and bad circuits. The math is pretty minimal considering what it could be, and it explains concepts in a practical rather than theoretical manner. If you understand Ohm's Law and have an interest in the material it should be plenty easy to learn from even if you have no formal education in the field. It's certainly not the only text (or the best text for specific topics), but it covers everything and covers it well. It's sometimes referred to as the bible for EE.

The Arduino certainly isn't the only micro platform out there (or even the best), but it's definitely the most beginner friendly thanks to the huge community and documentation. Like I said, there's a tutorial for everything. That's not quite the same with the Basic Stamp or straight AVR, especially considering you'd have to do all the coding by hand without the abstraction and simplification provided by the Arduino platform and libraries. Of course, I suggest that you move past the Arduino in the future, but for a beginner it's the only thing I'd recommend, personally. Especially if you're trying to bring other people into the hobby. Having to code with very little abstraction (having to directly manage hardware like timers), messing around with makefiles and multiple programs in the programming toolchain, and using a specific programmer instead of just USB would probably turn off a lot of newbies.

Some cool projects would be working with RFID (Parallax makes a great RFID kit that's easy to integrate with microcontrollers including the Arduino), such as opening doors which would also teach motor control, or using it as an interface system. If you're looking through the Adafruit store, the Tweet-a-Watt is a pretty slick piece of hardware, although pretty expensive. All kinds of things to learn there, from wireless networking to how current sensing works to power management.