When I was shopping for some goodies at All Electronics I came across a circuit card they were selling for $1. Description indicated that the board included two voltage regulators, a crystal and assorted parts. I like to scrounge and look up the parts used in consumer electronics so I purchased one of these […]

Florin shows us how to convert a Nokia 1110 cell phone’s normal monochrome LCD to a color LCD scrounged from a Nokia 1600. This article does not have much to do with microcontrollers or electronics hobby work but it is interesting and shows that you can hack your cell phones to make them suit your […]

I did some more scrounging to create a mini Locnar using the LEDs from a Glade Light Show air freshener. The wall wart had previously been scrounged from this air freshener for the bread board power supply. Now we reuse part of the circuit board with the LEDs combined with what we learned in […]

While working on a variable current load for some power supply testing I discovered that I had no medium size (T0-220) power transistors. I needed one to act as the pass element controlling load current. I did a quick look in my box of old electronic gadgets for scrounging and found several candidates which would […]

You need a water bottle to keep your soldering station sponge wet. I made a great soldering station water bottle from, you guessed it, a plastic water bottle. This is no big revelation but it is easy to do and works well. Just drill a small hole in the cap from your next bottled water. […]

How-to sort a 1 pound grab-bag of small electronic components. I sort through one of the $1 grab-bags I purchased at the Austin Summer fest 2007 HAM meet up. The reason these grab-bags are cheap is that you have to do a lot of work to make the collection of parts useful. I explain my […]

We attended the Austin Summerfest ham meet up. I took along my limited digital camera to capture some shots. The quality is so-so but I hope you get the general idea. Ham fest events are great for the electronic hobbyist. The Ham’s bring large collections of components and test equipment to sell or swap. You […]

How-to identify and locate information for electronics components you can recycle from discarded gadgets. Brandon gives us example pictures and descriptions for most types of electronics components to help you stock up your home electronics lab. This is a must read for new electronics hobbyist.
This article was submitted by Brandon Uhlig as part of the […]

I have scrounged up several LCD displays and wanted to use one with the Arduino. At the very least I wanted to test the displays. For future projects with the Arduino having a LCD display could be very handy so for this reason it is a good first project as well.

Unfortunately interfacing an LCD uses […]

Here is a truly barebones Arduino setup. Just the Arduino chip and a few support parts. This has to be close to the simplest and lowest cost way to play with microcontrollers. The only special parts are the resonator and the Mega168 programmed with the Arduino boot loader. Everything else you should already have […]