Jim Wink's Make Blog

I had to do this. Partially because I could, but also partially because I needed a quick project. I hadn't done many projects recently (well, summer, duh) and I needed to do something easy with some real impact. Even if I wasn't sure who in the neighborhood would get the joke. I live in the 'burbs - a lot of non-geeks out here. I decided to do some real soldering on this one. I wanted to create a unit I could keep for later if I wanted to use it. I started with a pile o f red LED's I had liberated from a set of Christmas lights. Many of these LED's came pre-equipped with their own resistor. I'm not entirely sure why, though I've noticed during my forays with the RGB LEDs that the red typically wanted lower voltage. I settled on 12 because its what I could comfortably fit in a Radio Shack proto-board. The LEDs with the resistor seemed okay with the 5 volts the Arduino put out without having issues, but the remaining non-resistored ones were rather bright oth...

I've never had a blog before, and for that matter, never had a reason. Now I do, or at least now I want to get some things down before I forget. If any of this winds up being useful to other people, great. If not, well, I've got notes out in the cloud I can get back to from anywhere. It has come to my attention that computers are better at remembering things than my own brain - more on that later... For a while I've had a number of ideas regarding various gadgets I wanted to build. Most of these gadgets are of an electronic nature. I am a Software Engineer by trade. While I've got 15+ years of experience programming in various languages, I've got little or no experience with electronics. This has, until recently, stopped me from acting on any of these ideas. With software you can debug and you can try again with little or not consequences. With electronics sometimes if you make a mistake you can fry a component - and you're out real money. I hadn't gotten in...