MS takes another kick at the user right on year’s end. I downloaded what I thought would be sufficient reading material for today only to discover in my haste at the library I have docx files. These are the “new” documents produced by the “new” MS Word. They cannot be viewed by earlier versions which work perfectly well. I can fix it, but not until next year now. That company has sure gone downhill without old Bill at the rudder. Ironic how a corporate pirate like him resented it when others did the same at street level.I had intended a nice relaxing day of deep study, now put off, but instead I’ll use it for planning. I’ve gathered some new and salvaged electronics parts and don’t know where to start. So you can follow along. Deciding a power supply would be a good first step, I got nowhere until I discovered at the breadboard level it is called a “voltage regulator”. Of these, the most common and popular is the 7805 and I found a brand new one in my kit. I thought it was a transistor.
It will accept input voltages of 7.5V to 30V and output a steady 5V, the rest being converted to heat by a prominent cooling fin atop the plastic casing. I know it all sounds so easy when somebody else has done all the research, but my work carries the warning that anyone who reads it will learn something. I’m going to put this component through the paces until I can build it in my sleep. (By build, I mean there are several ways to configure the 7805 into a circuit to improve its performance.)
My Arduino still has not arrived. Resistors are cheap and I was buying a 99 cent pack at the Shack when one of the clerks asked where I had learned “all that stuff”. I doubt he believed me when I told him I was also a beginner. Back home, I got reminded how I had asked another person, Brian Streimer, that same question twenty years ago, and he’s said the same. That once you tinker with electronics, you simply learn the practical part on your own.
This now makes abundant sense. If I fry something, it will be a cheap part. If I design everything to work on 5V from my 7805 (note how it just slides off my tongue now), what’s the worst that could happen? I fry a 50 cent capacitor? Let’s return in the future to see how well my 5V rule gets implemented. Most internal computer connectors work with 5V.
I put together a couple of CDs with the same introductory material I’d started on mere months back and donated them to the Shack. If the guy contacts me by e-mail, we may become the founding members of the Arduino Robotics & Experimentation Commonwealth of South Florida. Let me confirm that learning anything above gronk level is a lonely process and it really does help to know somebody else is enduring the same agony.
Alright, five hours later I can report complete success with the 7805. I still want to test other configurations, but I got a smooth and pretty 5.000 Volts, and that makes my day. I then fried two LEDs testing a current direction circuit that was so simple, I’m now going to tear it apart and find out how that happened. I suspect it goes way back to the analogy that electricity flows like water and I have a tendency to put resistors before the component. Since I was testing current, I probably got them in reverse when the current was in reverse because I can only think forward.
I found the error, my fault is I am not yet used to the peculiar zig-zag thinking needed to wire breadboards. I learned a valuable principle and will now always put a resistor when in doubt. The fireworks started early today, so I curled up with a good book before heading for the New Year’s gig. And what a gig it was, a complete sellout crowd with free food. I hosted a six hour show which included an open mic, a jam, a live Karaoke and my standard e-bass solo.
That was a good way to close the fateful year of 2010. Sometimes I get to thinking I can’t take my solo bass act to the next level, then a night like tonight comes along where I steal the show. Strangers walk to the stage with tips and compliments; always along the line of they’ve never seen or heard anything like it before. This puts me at sixes and sevens, I believe is the expression. The show has incredible novelty, but could I play the same joint twice? I believe I just did, but it was a joint and a half.
I was curious to learn that during that bloodbath called World War I, there were only six battles. Incidentally, it was a war made possible by birth certificates. Germany invented the certificates in the 1860s when creating the world’s first old age security system. When others followed suit, it didn’t take long for them to abuse the information to calculate the size of each other’s armies.
