Too few hours in the day //Jafoca.com

In addition to the stuff from NKCelectronics I got in the mail yesterday, I also received a box from Mouser. It seems like Mouser and DigiKey both have similar things, but there are always parts that you can find at one and not the other, as was the case with the digital multimeter I wanted – the Extech EX330.

So – why did I choose this DMM?  Well, unlike some other people I know, I do not have ‘all too easy’ access to $400 Fluke MM’s a work.  I wanted something good enough for most everything, but I didn’t really want to spend a LOT of money on it.

After consulting the EE buddy, Nick, he said that the one nice feature I should look for on a low-mid range MM would be frequency.  The EX-330 has that, great.

It also has a couple of nifty features that are a bit more unusual for a DMM in this price-range - temperature probe and a non-contact voltage detector (for high voltage, above 100v).  That was pretty cool.

And of course, a more qualatative measure took a bit of weight in the decision process – I thought this model of MM looked nicer than some of the others in this segment.

I was perhaps a bit wrong on that estimation – I thought the MM was red and black.  As is plainly shown in the photo at right, they opted for a much more orange and green scheme which is a bit off IMHO – ahh well, they aren’t racing stripes so the performance will not be affected.

Aside from the DMM, the other parts I got from Mouser are not too exciting – yet.  The list includes some higher power n-fets and a couple of ICs for driving high power LEDs.  Hopefully these will be in action soon.

I made an order a while ago from DigiKey. I got some basic electronics prototyping stuff as well as a few sensors and LEDs t play around with. One of the more interesting things I picked up was a Ziglog ZDots PIR sensor (click to view datasheet).

Now this is not the usual PIR sensor that everybody in the arduino community usualy uses, that would be the parallax sensor from SparkFun.
This sensor, from what I saw, has a couple of distinct advantages over the SparkFun sensor:

1. It is less expensive than the SparkFun sensor ($2-3 woohhoooo!)
2. It operates in dual modes, hardware (digital) or serial mode – in which it accepts all kinds of advanced commands
3. I like to be different – the sparkfun sensor has been done before…

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Last week it occurred to me that I was bothering Nick a bit too much for his knowledge of electronics.  He has been pretty happy to assist me as I explore his realm of expertise, however I think i have a bit too many questions.  

I decided to find an alternate source of reference material and found O’Reilly’s “Designing Embedded Hardware”.  The book looked to be just what I needed, and I am an amazon Prime member – so the book arrived yesterday (friday).  I don’t make the most monies, but I suppose that I can justify this rather expensive book by the fact that it is a useful skill I am learning, not just some trash.

I dug into the book today (yay for saturday fun!!!  Reading reference material is always fun!) and immediately got the sensation that I was back at Hope sitting in a CSCI class.  In this case, the same as it was when I was there, this is just fine as I am learning something interesting to me, so I am enjoying it quite a bit.

The book itself starts out with some of the standard theory – “This is what a computer is”, “this is what a processor is”, etc.  Which is all fine and good, but not what I immediately need.  I quickly read the first chapter on computer theory, microprocesors, and microcontrollers (didn’t concretely realize the difference before), then skipped the next chapter on Assembly Language because it was assembly for a PIC and some other chip, not for AVRs, which I am currently interested in.  The next chapter, “Basics of electricity” is really what I need, and I am knee deep in it now.

Sofar so good.  You can pick up the book at Amazon (note I do not get any kickbacks from Amazon or O’Rielly)

So after receiving my arduino last week from Seeed studio, I have been itching to give it a roll.  Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, I stupidly forgot to pick up a breadboard so I have been pretty limited to what I can do.  That has not stopped me from hooking up a single LED and my giant mushroom button!  That is the standard 2nd or 3rd development tutorial step.

I then set to work creating a toggle’d light switch with the button.  One press turns it on, next press turns it off kind of thing.  The problem is that you experience a phenomena called bouncing where the light may not do exactly what you want it to do when you activate the switch.  I thought I could figure out how to de-bounce the input from the switch myself, however it was a bit more of a pain that I thought it might be.

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This one falls on the HARD side of hardware…

Inspired by my good friend Nick, who does EE and works at the product design / idea house TwisThink, I decided to jump into the world of physical computing via Arduino.    I apparanty know a thing or two about software, so I thought I would mix it up a bit and learn something about hardware.

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