Learning the Art of electronics - digital parts

[s1512783]

I'm nearing the end of the analog section of the book and I was trying to order parts for the digital one, but it looks like in order to do the microcontroller lessons, you need custom LCD/programming and keypad boards. The https://learningtheartofelectronics.com has a document on ordering the LCD (you have to send a cheque?? to Boston, and it costs over $150 delivered in the States, no mention of international shipping costs), but it doesn't even say anything about the keypad.

Has anybody figured out a cheaper alternative which would be available in the UK? It'll be a tough hit on my student budget to spend £200 on a board I'll only use once.

[rstofer]

The display itself is unlikely to be anything special.  It's the controller board that adds all the features and, you're right, the price is outrageous.

OTOH, the experiments that use the board will be a good deal more difficult without the display. 

It is certainly possible to use the TIL311.   It even has the transparent latch feature but logic to drive it to latch part of a 16 bit bus will be up to you.  It shouldn't be difficult - in 8085 speak, you use the ALE' signal (Address Latch Enable).  You will need some kind of PCB to mount them, the displays aren't necessarily breadboard friendly in that they are oriented the wrong way.  Still, there's a heck of a price difference.  There are used devices on eBay (US).

Where does the Big Board come from?

[bd139]

To be clear the current edition won't work with a bunch of TIL311's. It has some extras: https://learningtheartofelectronics.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/LCD_board_overview_nov16.pdf

Edit: although reading it, it seems expensive for a hex/binary output.

[s1512783]

I really like the book's informal style and I feel like I've learned a lot from it, but they definitely could have done better on the hardware side, even the 'kits' that DigiKey offers are incomplete. I feel like the main issue is that, if I knew more about this stuff, I could easily source/build cheaper substitutes for most of the expensive bits, but in order to be able to do that, I need to learn about them, and in order to learn about them, I need the expensive bits. But then, I think the course is more aimed at university labs, where you'd have a large budget and use this stuff over many years of teaching. I wouldn't mind paying up if I either had the money or if it was something I could use and then sell on to somebody else doing the course as well.

I really would like to build the Big Board microcontroller, because it looks like a great way to learn about what's inside these things, but it looks like I'll have to save up for it for a while.

Where does the Big Board come from?

It's a name they use for a microcontroller project which you build on a couple of breadboards. In the book they say they also offer PCBs with data buses laid out which makes building it a bit easier, but there's also no mention of that on the website.

If I was to do this now, I'd do the 1st edition of the book and top up the knowledge on the analogue and computational side of things from the latest edition and the Internet. It was much fairer and used completely standard jellybean parts.

I really want to write a better book myself but the time hasn't materialised as it's a massive undertaking.

If I had known, I would probably have done that as well, but now it's too late after I've bought almost everything on the list. The great thing about this book is that it's stand-alone and does not require you to read AoE as you go along (which I'm doing anyway, but it's not necessary). I'd love to see your take on EE education if it ever comes out.

[bd139]

My take would be 150 or so short 1/2 A4 page sized experiments with a single concept on it. Similar in style to QST's Hands on Radio series. Some examples:

http://www.qsl.net/kl7jef/Experiment%202-The%20Emitter-Follower%20Amplifier.pdf
http://www.qsl.net/kl7jef/Experiment%203-Basic%20Operational%20Amplifiers.pdf
http://www.qsl.net/kl7jef/Experiment%204-Active%20Filters.pdf

[rstofer]

To be clear the current edition won't work with a bunch of TIL311's. It has some extras: https://learningtheartofelectronics.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/LCD_board_overview_nov16.pdf

Edit: although reading it, it seems expensive for a hex/binary output.

It's true the TIL311s aren't going to work as a binary display but it can't be all that hard to convert from hex to binary.  Not a perfect solution but probably workable.  It would be good practice!

The TIL311 does have the transparent latch feature which will be useful for multiplexed address buses.

The LCD Board has a lot of logic in support of the labs, no question.  It is worth the money?  Well, it depends on how much money you want to spend on the display.  I would buy it just to avoid deviating from the lab manual and I'm not overly sensitive to price.  OTOH, I could see younger people not wanting to spend a bunch of money on a display that may not be useful over the longer haul.

Besides, there is something to be learned when replacing the LCD Display with TIL311s.  There will still be a little logic involved with handling the transparent latch.  More often than not, it wants to be transparent (displaying a 16 bit value or two 8 bit values) but latched when working with a multiplexed bus.  The concept for the logic is in the LCD Display manual.

I'm not sure how to get to the 2 line display of address and data with just 4 TIL311s.  At some point, implementing all of the facility of the LCD Display by other means is going to take up a lot of time.  Maybe that's the point.

[bd139]

The 1st edition book used 4 TIL311's as they only addressed 128 bytes of RAM at 0x0000. I added another two to mine as I was using 2x 2114 SRAMs nicked out of a ZX80 (1 whole K) instead of an MCM6810 so I ended up with 4 for the address and 2 for the data. I only ever used the first 100 bytes or so of RAM so that was a complete waste of cash back then. TIL311's were much more expensive then!

You could in theory just buffer the address and data lines and add an LED to each for the binary display.

This was the programming interface for the original computer:



I hand assembled my code on paper then switched it in