In this chapter, we take a look at exactly what getting into building electronics projects involves, the kinds of great gadgets you can build yourself, what youâll get from spending your time with electronics, and what you need to commit to take the plunge.
What Is an Electronics Project, Anyway?
Obviously, an electronics project involves electronics, meaning that you use electricity to make something happen. However, overlaps exist among electronics, mechanics, and even programmable devices such as robots. Hereâs what we mean when we say electronics projects.
Electronics, mechanics, robotics: Huh?
Do you dream of building elaborate Erector Set-types of mechanical structures â perhaps a model of the Golden Gate Bridge with pulleys and levers moving objects around? Is your goal to create a robot butler with a programmed brain that enables it to serve your every whim? Well, those arenât exactly what we categorize as electronics projects.
Certainly, electronics projects are often combined with mechanical structures that use motors, and a robot has electronic components driven by microcontrollers and computer programs. In this book, though, we focus on projects that use simple electronics components to form a circuit that directs voltage to produce effects such as motion, sound, or light. By keeping to this simple approach, you can pick up all the basic skills and discover all the common components and tools that you need to work on a wide variety of projects for years to come. For these projects, you donât have to become a mechanical or programming whiz.
An electronic circuit might run a motor, light an LED display, or set off sounds through a speaker. It uses various components to regulate the voltage, such as capacitors and resistors. A circuit can also use integrated circuits (ICs), which are teeny, tiny circuits that provide a portion of your circuit in a very compact way. This saves you time micromanaging pieces of the project because somebody else has already done that job for you, such as building a timer chip that sets off a light intermittently.
Programmable versus nonprogrammable
ICs are preprogrammed or programmable. And that brings us to our next distinction.
Although we do use ICs in many of our projects â for example, in the form of a sound chip thatâs preprogrammed with beeps and music â for the most part, we keep away from programmable electronics. In order to work with programmable electronics, you have to get your hands dirty with programming code and microcontrollers, and thatâs not what weâre about here. Instead, we focus on building electronics gadgets that teach you about how electricity works and get your mind stirring with ideas about what you can do by using electronics, rather than computers.
Donât get us wrong: Microcontroller projects can be a lot of fun. After you get your hands dirty and pick up lots of basic skills doing the projects in this book, you might just go out and buy Microcontroller Projects For Dummies (if such a book existed).
Battery-powered versus 120 volts+
One other thing that we made a conscious decision about when writing this book was that we didnât want you tinkering with high-voltage projects. Electricity can be dangerous! Keeping to about 6 volts keeps you reasonably safe whereas working with something that uses 120 volts â like the juice that comes out of your wall socket â can kill you. While youâre discovering the basics of electronics, our advice is that itâs better to be safe than sorry.
When you get more comfortable and more knowledgeable about tools and skills and safety measures (which we put a lot of emphasis on, especially in Cha...