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Windows & .NET Watch: Wishing on a star for resources


By Larry O'Brien


 Larry O'Brien
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February 15, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 3)
I’ve had more than my normal amount of humiliation lately. Two new technologies have recently entered my life: one centers on a microcontroller and the other on glass. The microcontroller is the ATmega168, the processor that powers the Arduino platform. Hardware has become the new software, as least as far as hobbies go. Printing out “Hello World” is no longer enough to thrill a 13-year-old; now he or she demands making an LED blink.

I know nothing about electronics; heck, I break into a cold sweat when I upgrade RAM on a laptop. Nonetheless, to keep myself relevant in the eyes of my nephews and nieces, I’ve had little choice but to become friends with the clerks at the local Radio Shack, who keep a straight face every time I bring another handful of random components up to the checkout counter.

I need to make these visits because, when facing a project, I have no choice but to get the precise components specified, down to the part number. I have no capacity for reasoning about circuit design and nothing to let me know if I can substitute an electrolytic for a ceramic capacitor, or how to keep the Magic Blue Smoke inside a transistor (all I know about electronics is that when the Magic Blue Smoke escapes, things stop working).

Doug Teeple, a friend who converted his Karmann Ghia into a plug-in electric car (www.eghia.com), tells me that one can “think in circuit components,” but I am having a hard time finding resources. Books introducing Arduino seem to think that software is the more mysterious part and concentrate on explaining loops and state manipulation using the C-like Processing language.

Meanwhile, my imagination is leaping forward to projects like using "the fuzzy logic manifold editor" I built with Resolver One (see "Python: Arbitrarily interesting," Feb. 1, p. 35) to generate code to control a belt-driven alt-az telescope mount when I cannot crawl beyond the simplest step-by-step projects.

The telescope mount project is so precise because of my other humbling hobby. In contrast with electronics, I have some familiarity with astronomy. Like many geeks, I had a few mall-store telescopes growing up, and I know enough stars to tell Scorpio from the Pleiades (or as the Hawaiians view them, to tell Maui’s fish-hook from his kite).


Related Search Term(s): Arduino, astronomy, software development

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Comments


03/09/2009 03:39:37 PM EST

The first step is in learning that electronics can be learned. If you step past the daunting idea of the magic devices that surround us and start to learn little pieces, like programming a microcontroller, you see that it isn't magic. Anyone can learn the basics if they want to. You can still get the old Forrest Mims books on basic circuits, I fondly remember learning from these as a teenager trying to learn the same technologies.

United StatesAndrew Cooper


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