new hobby

last weekend i took a visit to a warehouse shop that sold all sorts of secondhand junk that local companies liquidated after going out of business. lots of computer chairs, monitors, keyboard, switches, racks, routers, everything.

also, lots of miscellaneous electronic parts.

i was there with my main sack, and he was rather curt with my questions about the purpose and functioning of various electronic parts. that got me thinking: why is my main sack such a sack? also: why don't i know these basic things about electronics?

answers: that's just the kind of sack he is, and there isn't a good reason.

so i ordered a pair of electronics beginner books (the theory being that they would probably both be lousy in one way or another but hopefully they'd complement each other in such a way that together they'd add up to one decent book) and got to reading. yesterday the sack, having been made to feel suitably bad about his rudeness, joined me at the local electronics store to pick out some parts to get me started on circuit building.

a slight detour: it turns out the local electronics store has a big shelf full of NOS (new old stock : original, unsold, 1940s era) vacuum tubes, which is just what i'd need to dink around with my new tube amp to achieve different sounds. a local tube source (assuming they have tubes i can use, i haven't memorized the varieties yet) is a major score. even if i can't use them in my amp, i'd like to bring my electronics know-how up to the level where i can construct a tube amp, and perhaps they'll have tubes for that.

in any case, they had much of what i needed, but not everything. i reluctantly went to radio shack, thinking that they'd suck for that sort of thing just as much as they suck for everything else. i was pleasantly surprised, they're a goldmine for hobbyist electronics, just as they were 20 years ago. i should have gone there first, but then i would not have gotten the warm fuzzies from supporting my local shop (established 1961).

later on we visited Frys and were majorly disappointed. fry's is rubbish, i don't know why i keep thinking otherwise. maybe it's just the PA store. i dunno. maybe i'd go there for an enclosure or something, which looked harder to find at RS, but more likely I'd just order online.

Anyhow, i finally got to tinkering. i got a basic LED circuit working (lesson learned: the D in LED stands for "don't forget it's a diode not a lamp") then moved on to a switched SPST LED circuit, then a SPDT switched dual LED circuit, and then, the biggest challenge so far, I figured out how to design a circuit for my red/green LED, using a DPDT switch (none of the switches were labeled to suggest proper wiring, and by this point, i'd already blown the fuse in my meter, so i had to use reasoning and meterless testing methods to get the layout right).

these circuits are extremely basic, but at the same time, i've only been at it one day. and, though my switched LED circuits are basic, they're quite useful. the last two circuits i made could be used to indicate which checker is ready to ring up your crap at fry's.