I spent some of the holiday writing a selection of tutorial pages as a response to some of the topics I have been asked about on this board. It is my attempt to fill a hole between the absolute beginner and those who want to be a little more ambitious in learning electronics. While they are just general purpose electronics they cover topics from an Arduino point of view and are topics that have come up several times on this board.
These are really good tutorials addressing topics that are really hard to find info on. Thanks for making them. Im just curius though, When I tried to look at your projects internet explorer took up close to 500mb of ram. Why? :-?
I felt mean mentioning it but it brought back memories of struggling to build electronic magazine projects as a kid when I didn't have a component available with exactly the same numbers on it as those I could see printed in the magazine photos.
A minute bit of knowledge about the possibility of alternatives and my electronic horizons widened enormously.
I noticed you jumped directly to "here's an 8x darlington package," but maybe a separate page beforehand would be a good place to introduce the general topic of using two different power supplies.
A quick schematic to show what a darlington pair is, and does.
The use of a step-up, either by darlington, or a hexfet (or an example for both), to allow a VDD Arduino drive a big load on 12V or more. Including a reversed diode if the load is inductive.
The use of step-down to allow a 5V Arduino control a 3.3V device.
Two that could be added is "pull up / down" resistors, and currrent limiting resistors for LED's, but they would be a little more specific than those you put up.
Thanks for the comments and suggestions, they sound good.
Wiz, I have memories of writing magazine articles and the print workers who set the lino type telling me "I have corrected the obvious mistake in your code" :-? They didn't understand logical bit wise operates and assumed it was an error.
Halley - The Darlington drivers was supposed to be a practical example of where power dissipation was the limiting factor not the devices current rating. But point taken so I think I will tackle the two power supplies first. That and split supplies always seemed to cause problems.
Nigel - Thanks, my idea was to bridge the gap between beginners and engineer and cover stuff you don't usually see so it looks like I have succeeded for you.
It would probably be good to put a link in the Playground to these but I am not sure where the best place to put it would be, any suggestions?
I seem to recall you mentioned (or I found out) that you wrote for BBC Micro magazines back in the day. I have a sneaking suspicion I remember reading articles you wrote. I keep thinking of digging out some of my old mags to take a look.
Mainly "the Micro User" then it changed it's name to Acorn Computing finally it merged with Acorn User. If you have ever read any of the first two titles you will have had the opportunity to skip one of my articles as I had something published in every one, that's 144 issues I think. Plus the 70 or so I had in Acorn User.
