Simple Solar Circuits Simple Solar Circuits: How to get started adding solar power to your small electronics projects. Use the sun to power small solar and battery powered night lights, garden lights, and decorations for halloween. The first part of a solar circuit is… a device for collecting sunlight. To keep things simple, we’re using a single nicely made small solar panel for all of these circuits. [Before we move onto our first examples, a word of caution: These are small simple circuits. Direct Drive: The most obvious way to use power from a solar panel is to connect your load directly to the output leads of the solar panel. Here are a couple of examples of this in practice: On the left, we’ve hooked up one of our little solar panels directly to a small motor taken from an old CD player. Interruption-resistant direct drive: The “direct drive” circuits work well for their design function, but are rather basic. Instead of adding a single supercapacitor, you might notice that we’ve actually added two.
Circuit Simulator Applet This is an electronic circuit simulator. When the applet starts up you will see an animated schematic of a simple LRC circuit. The green color indicates positive voltage. To turn a switch on or off, just click on it. The "Circuits" menu contains a lot of sample circuits for you to try. Full Screen version. Directions. Standalone (offline) versions. Index of Circuit Examples.
Control real world devices with your PC Parts list: Picaxe 08M chip available from many sources including Rev Ed (UK), PH Anderson (USA) and Microzed (Australia) Protoboard, servo, microswitch, 9V battery, 4xAA batteries and holder, tag strip, 10k resistor, 22k resistor, 33uF 16V capacitor, 0.1uF capacitor, 7805L low power 5V regulator, 10k pot, wires (solid core telephone/data wire eg Cat5/6), 6V lightbulb, D9 female socket and cover, 2 metres of 3 (or 4) core data wire, battery clips The above companies also sell USB to serial devices which are useful for laptops which don't have a serial port. It is worth noting that some USB to serial devices don't work as well as others and it is worth getting one from one of the above suppliers as they have been tested for use with picaxe chips.
Free electronics projects and circuit diagrams (schematics) for hobbyists. Build your own electronic gadgets How to build electronic devices on your own Building electrical devices is probably the most inexpensive engineering you can do because most electronic components are very cheap, like less than $1. How to actually build devices on your own isn't taught enough in engineering courses, so here's a quick summary of how to get started making devices like I have on my site. In this page, I kind of assume you're an engineer/scientist of some sort (or studying to be one) and that you've already had a few electrical engineering classes. If you don't know any electrical engineering, you'll obviously need to learn the basics before you can start inventing. , which teaches you theory and practical knowledge of components at the same time. First, get an idea To get an idea for something cool to make, it helps to go to online stores for electronic components (Jameco.com is a good one) and look at the components they have. Also, I really recommend getting a microcontroller, like the Arduino. Buy parts Here are a few typical parts that I use a lot:
Electronics - Electronic Components Distributor Featured Product The Jameco Difference Jameco has been in business for over 35 years and carries over 50,000 semiconductors, passives, interconnects, electromechanical, power supplies, LEDs and other popular electronic components. Learn More About Jameco » At Your Service Talk to a live agent ortechnical assistant. Will Call Hours Monday-Friday 8AM TO 5PM PSTClosed Holidays 1355 Shoreway Road, Belmont, CA 94002Click here for directions Copyright ©2002 - 2014 Jameco. Basic Electronics Parts List: 2N3904 PNP transistor 2N3906 NPN transistor 47 ohm - 1/4 Watt resistor 1K ohm - 1/4 Watt resistor 470K ohm - 1/4 Watt resistor 10uF electrolytic capacitor 0.01uF ceramic disc capacitor 5mm red LED 3V AA battery holder Optional: 10K ohm - 1/4 Watt resistor 1M potentiometer This next schematic may look daunting, but it is actually rather straight-forward. It is using all of the parts that we have just gone over to automatically blink an LED. Any general purpose NPN or PNP transistors should do for the circuit, but should you want to follow along at home, I am using 293904 (NPN) and 2N3906 (PNP) transistors. I learned their pin layouts by looking up their datasheets. For instance, from the datasheet for the 2N3904 transistor, I was quickly able to see that pin 1 was the emitter, pin 2 was the base, and pin 3 was the collector. Aside from the transistors, all of the resistors, capacitors, and LED should be straight-forward to connect.