[ale] Working with custom hardware/microcontrollers

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sat, 2010-06-19 at 13:53 -0400, Jim Kinney wrote:
> intro (and semi - pro as well) hacker part; arduino! has IO ports ans
> can do cool stuff AND its programmable pretty easily.

That is interesting stuff!

Of course, something I'd like to learn how to do is this:
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardSerialSingleSided3

It pretty much assumes that you know what you're doing to build the
thing and "etch" it.  I'd like to learn all that stuff, from the ground
on up.

	--- Mike

> 
> On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 1:28 PM, Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us>
> wrote:
>         Hello,
>         
>         Recently, I have kind of gotten fascinated with the idea of
>         doing more
>         things that would involve hardware, both attached to a PC and
>         controlled
>         by microcontrollers.  However, I am also finding that it seems
>         a bit
>         difficult to find enough information to get a solid start in
>         figuring
>         out what I need to acquire to do things.  It probably doesn't
>         help that
>         I'm very much a software person and know very little about
>         actual
>         low-level electronics, which is what I would like to learn
>         about.
>         
>         I'm wondering if anyone on here has been in that boat and
>         knows of some
>         decent resources to use to get started.  I know that I would
>         eventually
>         need a breadboard to play with things (though what do you do
>         with a
>         circuit after you've prototyped it on the breadboard and then
>         want to
>         use it in something?) and that I would need to find a decent
>         amount of
>         reading material and also buy collections of wires, resistors,
>         capacitors, microcontrollers and all that jazz.  I just don't
>         have a
>         clue where to start.
>         
>         Many of the things that I would like to do can be done by
>         purchasing
>         something that someone else has made, more likely than not,
>         and adapting
>         it for my usage.  That's fine, but I actually want to learn
>         about these
>         things, and I have a few ideas for what I think might be
>         somewhat small
>         projects that would enable me to learn how to do things
>         assuming I can
>         find a base to start working with.
>         
>         Eventually I would like to have learned enough to do bigger
>         things, such
>         as creating custom self-sufficient hardware for various
>         specific
>         applications, though I don't have any clue where I would go
>         about doing
>         something like that.
>         
>         Oh, yeah, and here's something else that I don't have: real
>         serial
>         ports.  I do have a USB thing that has multiple serial ports
>         coming off
>         of it, but I don't know that I could program them in the same
>         way as a
>         "real" serial port.  Probably would be to my advantage to
>         learn how to
>         use USB as a communications mechanism for such hardware,
>         wouldn't it?
>         
>                --- Mike
>         
>         _______________________________________________
>         Ale mailing list
>         Ale at ale.org
>         http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>         See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>         http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> -- 
> James P. Kinney III
> Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness 
> Doing pretty well on all 3 pursuits    
> 
>  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.
>    Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith", 1992 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo