24 Aug
2012
24 Aug
'12
12:02 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
I am very 'picky' in my choice of kits:-). If possible I try to see the
manual before I buy the kit (some companies put them on their wrb pages)
just to see what the design consists of. And if I don't like it, I don't
buy the kit.
There are some _horrible_ kits sold by Maplin over here. They claim to
have associations with Middlesex University. They ridiculous feature is
that there is no shcematic included.Now I can reverse-enginer them (last
one I did had 3 74HC00s in it, as we all know I've doen things with
rather more TTL than that). But how you can possibly learn from such a
kit is beyond me...
I have mentiond this before. Some years back I bought some 'robot' kits.
One of them was, indeed, associated with Middlesex University (the box
says 'Miuddlesex University Teaching Resources'.Theo thers were
Far-Eastern in origin. The differnce is amazing.
The first one contsists of 2 pre-assembled motor/gearbox units, a
pre-built PCB containing an 8 pin PIC and a motor driver, and a couple of
microcswitches. Assembly consists of screwwign the bits ot the chassis
plate and conencting the wires to the screw terminal blocks on the PCB.
There is no schematic in the insctructions, no source listing, no
explanation of what you are doing.
The far-eastern ones use an electret microphone to detect collisons (or
ohter noise). The kits (which are similar in concept, although very
differnet mechanically) consist of a pile of gears and spindles, a small
motor, a bag of R's , Cs and a botu 10 discrete transisotrs, a bare PCB,
etc. You get to sodler it all up and then screw it together. The
instructions cotnai na scheamtic and even a simplified description of how
it works (of the level 'this transistor amplifies the signal from the
microphone' -- it doesn't expalin exactly waht the biasiing resisotrs do
and how they were claculated).
The latter seem much more educational to me.
I prefer kits for many reasons : They normally
come with adequate
documatation.
You must be finding different kits than I see around here. Most of them I've seen in the last 15 years have a
pre-programmed code-locked
That's becuase nobody these days can design without a microcontroller.
Or so it seems to me.
microcontroller with no source code, so all you can
learn by building
the kit is soldering skills.
Inm the case of the CP/M computer boards that started this thread, I
beleive at least some fo them are 'open' meaning you get schematics,
boot/bios sources, etc. I'ev not built any of them, but I woudl think
you could learn a lot from those.
-tony