Arduino Workshop by John Boxall
While “thumbing” through an online version of the book Arduino Workshop by John Boxall I ran across Chapter 10, which has the title Accepting User Input with Touchscreens.
“Yeah, right,” I thought to myself. “That sounds easy … not!”
Within a couple pages I became an instant believer … and hopped online to order the necessary hardware.
NOTE: I’m not an expert on the best ways to utilize Dupont connectors; I’m just sharing what has worked for me.
One of the more frustrating things for me as an “electronics beginner” was the problem of making dependable connections between separate devices at the circuit level.
Prototyping on a solder-less breadboard is a breeze with purpose-made jumper wires, even though it can get to be a little confusing…
Atari Punk Console on Breadboard using Jumper Wires
…and it’s fairly easy to create custom breadboard wires when the time is right:
Atari Punk Console on Breadboard using Custom-cut Wires
You might even say that soldering up a permanent version of a circuit on perfboard or a PCB isn’t all that difficult:
Atari Punk Console on Perfboard (Top)
Atari Punk Console on Perfboard (Bottom)
But how do you deal with connections to devices or components that aren’t on the same board? Some kind of standardized connector would sure be nice. Enter …
I recently volunteered to teach an Electronics merit badge class for Boy Scouts in my area. I tried to anticipate challenges that might arise when describing small components like resistors and capacitors to a large group, or demonstrating how to use a soldering iron.
That made me think of a 37″ LCD TV that a friend gave me a few months ago when I was scrounging for “used electronic devices”.
They said that it tended to go haywire in the middle of movies, etc. Without even testing it, I had left it out on my (covered) deck where it acquired a nice coat of dust … but now I wondered if it might work well enough to serve as a poor man’s projection screen.