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Lately, work has been satisfying my software development drive, so I've started getting back into another hobby - electronics. I dug out an old 'lots of projects in 1' kit from my closet and sent out a few orders to various places (primarily mouser, amazon, and ebay) to start creating a full kit to work from.
After receiving the first few things I ordered, I started playing around and wired up a 'white noise' generator based on avalanche noise. I built the circuit 5 times, but it never seemed to work for some reason when I made it on the kit's breadboard. I finally got out my separate breadboard and power supply, and lo and behold, it worked wonderfully (apparently when a schematic says you need a voltage source of a certain strength, it might say that because fewer volts will not work properly =-).
Yesterday my oscilloscope arrived, and it was rather awesome to example the white noise wave on it. Since my oscilloscope isn't officially calibrated, I decided I'd like to generate some signals from my sound card and use the oscilloscope's measurement capabilities to check the frequency, and all seems well so far (at least up to 8khz, which isn't far for a 250MHz oscilloscope). Now I'm working on a signal generator program in python that will also give me something awesome to look at on my oscilloscope. After that, maybe I'll start working on some kind of game on the oscilloscope. Analog computers are neat =-)
oscilloscopes can be vector displays
Now that this is a new month (and my "fun money" budget reset), I'm considering buying an FPGA board. I can't decide whether I cant to spend a bit more and get a fully functional board (from diligent) that has RAM etc already built in, or whether I'd like to get a bare bones board (specifically, the $50 "Spartan 3A evaluation board" board from avnet that has a few buttons, a bit of flash memory, and lots of headers). Since I have no soldering experience and SRAM doesn't seem to offer many DIP options, I'll probably go with the more expensive board, but, then again, learning to solder would probably help quite a bit with some of the projects I want to do eventually - breadboards have tons of parasitic problems with high-frequency circuits, and with the FPGA, I have several video projects I'll get around to eventually.
After receiving the first few things I ordered, I started playing around and wired up a 'white noise' generator based on avalanche noise. I built the circuit 5 times, but it never seemed to work for some reason when I made it on the kit's breadboard. I finally got out my separate breadboard and power supply, and lo and behold, it worked wonderfully (apparently when a schematic says you need a voltage source of a certain strength, it might say that because fewer volts will not work properly =-).
Yesterday my oscilloscope arrived, and it was rather awesome to example the white noise wave on it. Since my oscilloscope isn't officially calibrated, I decided I'd like to generate some signals from my sound card and use the oscilloscope's measurement capabilities to check the frequency, and all seems well so far (at least up to 8khz, which isn't far for a 250MHz oscilloscope). Now I'm working on a signal generator program in python that will also give me something awesome to look at on my oscilloscope. After that, maybe I'll start working on some kind of game on the oscilloscope. Analog computers are neat =-)
oscilloscopes can be vector displays
Now that this is a new month (and my "fun money" budget reset), I'm considering buying an FPGA board. I can't decide whether I cant to spend a bit more and get a fully functional board (from diligent) that has RAM etc already built in, or whether I'd like to get a bare bones board (specifically, the $50 "Spartan 3A evaluation board" board from avnet that has a few buttons, a bit of flash memory, and lots of headers). Since I have no soldering experience and SRAM doesn't seem to offer many DIP options, I'll probably go with the more expensive board, but, then again, learning to solder would probably help quite a bit with some of the projects I want to do eventually - breadboards have tons of parasitic problems with high-frequency circuits, and with the FPGA, I have several video projects I'll get around to eventually.
In the end, we didn't end up using the tools very much... but it was still fun to play around with. Good luck on the other projects!