Electronics > Beginners
Make Electronics book 2nd edition components list?
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scatterandfocus:
bd139, admittedly I haven't had time yet to look over all the projects in the book.  But from what I gather, the general scope of it is to give the reader some familiarity with some basic circuits and constructing them (analog and digital) and ending at doing some basic stuff with an arduino.  It seems to be a sort of bird's eye view and primer of general electronics.   There probably isn't anything terribly exciting in it, but I figured that to get going again with electronics I should jump back to the beginning and have some fun with it.  I took some electronics classes years ago and very little of it was hands on, mostly theory, very rushed, and poorly directed.  And it put me off from continuing with electronics since.  I figure I will approach it this time like a curious kid, and I wish that this sort of book existed back when my interest in electronics originally sparked.  I do have old copies of the Art of Electronics (text and student manual), but it is way over my head at this point.  And it was way over my head when I picked it up some years ago.  But you know, I picked it up a week or so ago just to have a look, and it didn't seem nearly as alien as I remember it being.

Ledtester, I will take a good look at the optical stuff, which I hadn't really considered other than wanting to get a couple of photoresistors to look at lcd display pwm frequencies and for just playing around with.  I didn't know that phototransistors even exist.  I'll look over that thread and the Mims book.

Thanks.
scatterandfocus:
Continuing on with the component gathering today, I couldn't find a suitable relay at Tayda.  The requirements are 9VDC coil, DPDT.  Highly recommended part numbers (because of pin layouts) in order:

Omron G5V-2-H1-DC9 (preferred)
Axicom V23105-A5006-A201
Fujitsu RY-9W-K

The Omron is part # is $3.18 at Digikey and Mouser.  2 required.

Also, no high-impedance earphone available form Tayda, Digikey, or Mouser.

And no neodymium magnets available at Tayda.  I didn't find any magnets at Mouser, but maybe my searching wasn't effective.  Digikey has lots of them starting at $0.23 each.  The book suggests K&J Magnetics for magnet info and purchase:  http://www.kjmagnetics.com/neomaginfo.asp
Further reading about the projects using magnets, one experiment uses a 3/16" by 1.5" magnet and 200 feet of 26 gauge to 22 gauge  of wire.  Another experiment uses a 3/4" by 1" magnet and 350 feet of 26 gauge magnet wire.  Another uses a 5/8" by 1" magnet and 500 feet of magnet wire.  I think that these experiments aren't really worth the cost of the supplies.  The experiments amount to dropping magnets through coils of wire to light led's and to charge a capacitor.  This also reaffirms that I should glance over all the projects in the book to find out if some of the experiments are trivial enough to cull some components from my list.
bd139:
9v relay and high impedance earphones?! Who the hell wrote that book?!?

9v relay you can use a 6v with a series resistor. You’d have to experiment with the value.

High impedance earphones are dead and gone. You can get the pink things still on amazon and aliexpress etc but they barely work properly.

I’m going to get the PDF of this and have a look.

Amazon sell those magnets as well I think.
scatterandfocus:
bd139, see updated post above.

I think that any author of a beginner electronics book such as this one would do good to think about component counts and costs for design of the example circuits.  From that mindset, I think that the components list could have likely been whittled way down while still effectively getting the points of the experiments across.  Maybe part of the design of this book is in the selling of kits.  I don't know, really.  But just as an example, by the point in the book that these magnet experiments come up (experiment 27) transistors have been used and it seems that a circuit involving a transistor could have been used for amplifying the effects of very small and cheap magnets passing through very small coils.  Or the same using the LM386 opamp in an experiment just a couple of experiments later.

As an example of experiment cost in this book, dropping a magnet through a a coil of magnet wire could cost around $30-40.   :-//

Cue the Asian father:  Why so expensive?
scatterandfocus:
On use of the high-impedance earphone, a couple of pages later in an 'Enhancement' section it is suggested that if you have a problem hearing anything through your earphone to try using a piezo.  Why not just use a piezo in the first place?  It seems to me that a piezo or two would be good to have on hand any way for general vibration sensing, although I don't see piezo's listed in the components or used elsewhere in the book.
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