Racing along with Make:Electronics

Finally had a long day without other interuptions than snowboarding and dinner. Not shabby! Made the quiz-engine in Experiment 21 and even modified the layout so it was more user friendly. A tad annoyed that there's no breadboard-friendly SPDT-switch (single toggle between two states) in Make:Electronics Kit 2. I had some lying around, but it'd be nice if the kit was really complete and everything working. The two dead 5V relays yesterday were also annoying.

Experiment 22 was just a quick primer, but experiment 23 was a good reminder about how super-easy it is to use microcontrollers rather than IC's to solve a problem. While it's possible to represent a dice with 7 LED's using clever wiring, a counter chip and a NOR chip, it would take much more effort to take this to a complete LED dice kit. It's much, much easier to solve such tasks with a small computer like this one from SpikenzieLabs. It's still useful to see how this would be solved before, so I'll complete all the experiments as there's always something to learn from them.

Have also started to publish images of the finished and working experiments on my Flickr account as seeing pictures there saved me a couple times when I started out. A tiny effort that can help others a lot. Below is video's of todays projects.