Beginners Help

Want to just shoot the breeze? Forum 42 is the place!

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rmail2006
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Beginners Help

Post by rmail2006 » Wed Sep 21, 2011 10:11 am

Hi everyone,
I've just decided to start making electronic items :)

I am wanting to make a small games console, PDA or similar but I know I will have to start with the basics for a few years.

The only electonics I have done is at school a few years ago and I can remember a canny bit.

So my question is can anyone give me good projects or reads that will help me understand more advanced electronics.

Some small projects I was going to make were things such as the Steady Hand Game, or the Operation game just to get me started.

Any other projects would be great :D

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minnieman
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Re: Beginners Help

Post by minnieman » Wed Sep 21, 2011 8:06 pm

start off with a NOAC or a nes, the easiest consoles to portablize.
every one of my trade offers comes with respect. just take that into consideration with my most likely appealing offer. :D

one day... my xbox 360 portable WILL HAPPEN!!
(to bad imma broke teen)

rmail2006
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Re: Beginners Help

Post by rmail2006 » Thu Sep 22, 2011 10:06 am

Hi thanks for the reply but im not after making a portable console from a current one I am wanting to create a one form scratch.

I found a great site that helps show you how to program PICs (bradsprojects) and he has some great projects such as a mario clone with LEDs:D

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bicostp
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Re: Beginners Help

Post by bicostp » Fri Sep 23, 2011 10:35 pm

Steady Hand and Operation are pretty simple to implement. Build a circuit and use the wand or tweezers as the switch. If you touch the two halves together, you trip the circuit. You can use a relay or MOSFET if you want your game to turn on something big without exposing players to high amounts of current.

Check out the electronics tutorials on this channel. It goes into some complex stuff, and shows you what not to do (and what happens when you do it anyway), but there's some good beginner/refresher material as well.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Afrotechmods" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Another simple project is a hard drive speaker. Basically you take a dead hard drive, disable the locking mechanism that parks the heads when you turn it off, and hook the read head arm's coil up to the speaker terminal on an amplifier. It's a fun project, especially if you build your own amplifier circuit and attach them together to create a relatively portable setup that can take input from a regular headphone jack.

Once you get the hang of building things with discrete components, check out the Parallax Propeller, or Arduino. They're relatively inexpensive ways to get your feet wet in microcontroller programming.

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jaqiefox
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Re: Beginners Help

Post by jaqiefox » Sat Oct 08, 2011 2:13 am

if you are on a budget for space and/or money, check out the MSP430 launchpad. it is $5 for a starter kit, and it is designed for implementation in stand alone devices, where other things like the arduino and teensy are designed for short term experimentation and not building a permanent device out of, as well as the end product being really tiny and low power use and cheap compared to something built with an arduino.
Jaqie Fox, Genuine girl techie | http://foxtecha.com

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