That Touchy Feeling

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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.

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Dupont Connectors

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.
 

INTRA-CIRCUIT CONNECTIONS

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

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

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 (Top)

Atari Punk Console on Perfboard (Bottom)

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 …

DUPONT CONNECTORS

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Neighborhood Ace

Written on 16 March 2014 and read to a group of writers gathered at the local Olive Garden for dinner that evening.

In my mind’s eye I was reliving (and embellishing) some of the antics we kids enjoyed in our central Arkansas neighborhood, circa 1975 … while adding in recent influences from the discovery of Eddie Rickenbacker’s World War I memoir “Fighting The Flying Circus” and a re-reading of the 1965/1973 young adult non-fiction book I got in junior high school called “Flying Aces of World War I“.

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DIY Camera Stand

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”.

Toshiba37AV502R_LCDTV

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.

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It’s about time!

I grabbed the kerryburton.com domain some 9 months ago, spent some time configuring WordPress for the website … and then forgot all about it.  I’m pretty much an idiot when it comes to website design (see http://bbburma.net) so I’m hoping WordPress will help me look good this time around … at least a little.

I want this site to help me share (and remember!) some of the things that I most enjoy. For now, I have made it hard for readers to log comments, because of the volume of “junk” comments that were logged while the site was still in incubation.

Stay tuned!