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I know jack poo poo about electronics. I would like to learn. I figure that, much like programming (which I can do just fine...though I don't have any experience with anything lower level like C), the best way to learn is to have a project you want to do. I've recently been looking at the Nest thermostat. From a naive perspective it seems like it should be easy-ish to build a simplified, less pretty, version myself and that all the heavy lifting would be done in code. Would this be a stupid project for me to cut my teeth on? Also, are the "Helpful Resources" in the OP still a good place for me to go to get started learning what I need to know?
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Apr 9, 2012 21:24
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Back when I was a kid we had a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer and it had a neat little game where you went around from room to room using diodes and resistors and whatnot to solve puzzles (or something...the details are kind of hazy) all as an excuse to learn about electronics. Does anything like that exist out there today for the PC?
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May 14, 2012 23:08
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taqueso posted:Was it Rocky's Boots? That was a great game. AFAIK there is nothing similar today. Yes! That was great and it's a shame if nothing similar exists today.
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May 15, 2012 01:25
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Fatal posted:And this is why I hate the old school electronics mentality. Elitism works both ways, hating on Arduino because it's overkill is just as silly as that dude's mustache. Arduino has dramatically lowered the barrier of entry and exposed a world of electronics to people who would have never before even considered making something on their own. Who cares if they never get past the point of a blinking a bunch of LEDs that respond to their twitter feed? It sure is as a whole hell of a lot better than playing farmville all day. YES. I can see being amused at someone having an attitude that's like "hey dudes, I'm an electronics expert!", when they don't know much of anything, but to get elitist on them? Please. They made something! Why do you care if they don't have an EE degree or understand electronics in a deep, meaningful way?
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May 29, 2012 21:46
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Valdara posted:I am a high school physics teacher as of two months ago. The school needed a quick replacement for a teacher who had to leave, so I stepped in. Yesterday was the last day of classes, and two of my students came up and asked me to be the adviser for the robotics team. I said hell yes, because robots are awesome. My degree is in engineering, and I took an EE course in college, but I am pretty clueless about building robots. I can solder and I have a solid understanding of the AP-level E&M topics (resistors, capacitors, AC/DC, induction, etc), but it has been a very long time since I fooled around with a breadboard. I don't have experience with any of them, but Google for "school robotics kits". There's lots (several?) of them geared for this type of stuff.
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Jun 2, 2012 18:57
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Can/should I use any ole' DC-to-AC inverter in a vehicle for charging NiCd and lithium ion power tool batteries or is there something in particular I should look for when purchasing one?
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Jun 6, 2012 18:16
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Slanderer posted:^ Yeah. Slanderer posted:good info Thanks. Delta-Wye posted:Really cheap DC-AC inverters put out square waves with the proper RMS voltage; these are godawful and won't work right with sensitive AC devices. For stuff like laptop power supplies, they are usually fine. I'm not sure where a charger sits on that continuum. Would it be possible to get a battery charger that will run off of 10-14V DC directly? Ahh, yes. A quick Amazon search shows the pure sine wave inverters are probably what I need. I have power tools from like 4 different manufacturers. While they probably all make DC-to-DC chargers, they're around $100 bucks from each manufacturer. I've already got the AC battery chargers and a pure sine wave inverter looks to cost around $150 for the wattage I'd need. I wonder how hard it would be to build a DC-to-AC inverter myself? Good beginners electronics project?
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Jun 6, 2012 22:11
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Slanderer posted:Wait, really? Are you connecting up multiple battery chargers at once or something? That's just a lot more than I would've expected this to cost you... I could have up to 3 chargers going at once, and going by what's printed on the back of them the input amperage totals about 5 amps. Look at the pure sine wave inverters on Amazon... Actually it looks like I'd spend over 200 easy.
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Jun 6, 2012 23:48
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Ambrose Burnside posted:i’ve been reading more about oscillator quartz crystal grinding and turns out it used to be very commonplace, in the bad old times before decent VFOs were available. if you go back to the 30s, all radio hobbyists ground their own crystals- hams bought their oscillators as untuned crystal blanks and would have to freehand lap them to the exact desired frequency before being able to send or receive on whatever given frequency. here’s an archived article about it that’s neat: https://archive.is/20120730045823/http://www.edn.com/blog/1470000147/post/580024458.html Your posts match your avatar so well.
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May 5, 2020 02:10
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My main problem with Arudino is the Arduino IDE...but that's because I'm used to real IDEs. It's fine for beginners to programming I guess.
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May 17, 2020 21:32
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I asked about this in the wiring thread, but I'll ask here as well. How do I measure power consumption of a 220v appliance to get it's cost to run? I'm wanting to figure out exactly how much a heat pump water heater is saving me, so I have my old resistance water heater hooked up and valved so I can switch between it and the new heat pump unit. I can obviously clamp a CT over each leg, but I'm not sure if I should be adding those values or taking the highest value or what. I'm sure it's a complex load that's running 110v for some stuff and 220v for some other stuff. There's fans and compressors and electronics and resistive heaters all inside this thing.
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May 21, 2020 19:27
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Stack Machine posted:I assume you're in the US so this is an appliance with a 4-prong L1/L2/N/G outlet. The total power is the sum of the currents in the 2 hot wires times 120V. There's probably not much flowing through the neutral so you could likely cheap out and measure one leg and multiply the current by 240 but the two leg method will work no matter what the load looks like. It's L1/L2/G. This is how every water heater I've seen around here (Missouri) is wired. Foxfire_ posted:For a water heater, the vast majority of the power consumption will be resistive and you don't really need anything more than Note that the new water heater is a heat pump water heater and depending on the mode its running in it will use no resistive heating. Foxfire_ posted:Doing an actual cost comparison between the two will require stuff beyond straight electrical power usage and won't be a simple number. Imagine if you had two heaters where one had more efficient heating and one had better insulation. Cost comparison will give you different answers for which is better depending on how much you are heating up new cold water vs maintaining temp on previously heated water. I'm looking at understanding the system as a whole. If I run one of them for a month and measure it's power consumption over that time and then do the same with the other...that should tell me how much it costs to run each of them no?
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May 21, 2020 20:05
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You've become an inscrutable koan generator.
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May 24, 2020 22:33
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When I was a kid I played this game on my Tandy CoCo that IIRC you moved from room to room ŕ la Zelda dungeons and slapped together electronics components to build circuits. My memories of it are pretty fuzzy, but I remember enjoying it. Does anyone have any idea what I'm talking about?
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May 27, 2020 05:55
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gently caress yes that's it! edit: and of course you can now play it in the browser via a JS emulator. edit2: but the fine movement keyboard shortcut doesn't seem to work 
Thermopyle fucked around with this message at 06:10 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 06:07
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Ambrose Burnside posted:got a question about ballast requirements for UV-C mercury vapour bulbs: I built one of these a few weeks ago. I didn't create a turntable, I just rotate the item(s) manually...much easier and less prone to something breaking without me realizing it and it always just exposing one side of the items to the full dose of UVC. Note that UVC is only weakly reflected so you need to increase your exposure time accordingly. This page has a calculator for exposure time vs bulb wattage and enclosure size. And yes, ballasts for tubes are weirdly specified. I ended up figuring out that you can source ballasts as if it was a regular fluorescent tube at the specified wattage. Of course you have to find the data sheet for every ballast since of course it's not something they just put in the item descriptions. The ballasts I looked at usually had a list of different bulbs and how many bulbs of that type it supported. I ended up with this ballast for a single PL-L55W/TUV 55 watt UVC bulb. I was never able to figure out what actually matters when it comes to driving these bulbs. You'd think you'd be able to just say this bulb requires X watts, Y amps, Z foobars and this ballast meets those requirements. But...all the data I came across was prescriptive in the sense that each ballast often specifies obtuse model numbers of bulbs it supports. It'd be nice if I could verify effectiveness with either a real handheld UVC sensing device or building something with a UVC sensor component but alas they're loving expensive. You should be able to smell ozone when opening your box. Put a safety switch on the lid to your enclosure so it shuts off the lamp when the lid is opened! Big Clive on YT has some videos on validating UVC output. Here's one where he uses a banana! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lzq6LuVWH0 Thermopyle fucked around with this message at 18:47 on May 31, 2020 |
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May 30, 2020 19:52
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