intro (and semi - pro as well) hacker part; arduino! has IO ports ans can do cool stuff AND its programmable pretty easily.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 1:28 PM, Michael B. Trausch <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mike@trausch.us">mike@trausch.us</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">Hello,<br>
<br>
Recently, I have kind of gotten fascinated with the idea of doing more<br>
things that would involve hardware, both attached to a PC and controlled<br>
by microcontrollers. However, I am also finding that it seems a bit<br>
difficult to find enough information to get a solid start in figuring<br>
out what I need to acquire to do things. It probably doesn't help that<br>
I'm very much a software person and know very little about actual<br>
low-level electronics, which is what I would like to learn about.<br>
<br>
I'm wondering if anyone on here has been in that boat and knows of some<br>
decent resources to use to get started. I know that I would eventually<br>
need a breadboard to play with things (though what do you do with a<br>
circuit after you've prototyped it on the breadboard and then want to<br>
use it in something?) and that I would need to find a decent amount of<br>
reading material and also buy collections of wires, resistors,<br>
capacitors, microcontrollers and all that jazz. I just don't have a<br>
clue where to start.<br>
<br>
Many of the things that I would like to do can be done by purchasing<br>
something that someone else has made, more likely than not, and adapting<br>
it for my usage. That's fine, but I actually want to learn about these<br>
things, and I have a few ideas for what I think might be somewhat small<br>
projects that would enable me to learn how to do things assuming I can<br>
find a base to start working with.<br>
<br>
Eventually I would like to have learned enough to do bigger things, such<br>
as creating custom self-sufficient hardware for various specific<br>
applications, though I don't have any clue where I would go about doing<br>
something like that.<br>
<br>
Oh, yeah, and here's something else that I don't have: real serial<br>
ports. I do have a USB thing that has multiple serial ports coming off<br>
of it, but I don't know that I could program them in the same way as a<br>
"real" serial port. Probably would be to my advantage to learn how to<br>
use USB as a communications mechanism for such hardware, wouldn't it?<br>
<br>
--- Mike<br>
<br>
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</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>-- <br>James P. Kinney III<br>Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness <br>Doing pretty well on all 3 pursuits <br><br> Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits.<br>
Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith", 1992 <br><br>