Thursday, November 29, 2012

Recent Scavenging

A few months ago I came across an old radio/record player and salvaged some of the parts. There were a lot of orange capacitors of different sizes. Some were square and marked 47n for 47 nanofarads or 2n2 for 2.2 nanofarads. Others were round and marked "6800 H70" or "15000 H90." Apparently the 6800 stands simply for 6800pF. I am not sure why they are labeled 6800 and not 6n8 like the other capacitors or why they are shaped differently either. Luckily the leads were long on all of them so I can use them for experimenting on my breadboard. I also got some good potentiometers.



A few weeks later I found an old television from the early 1980s. It had a lot of small potentiometers on the back which I think were used to adjust the picture. They are convenient to use on a breadboard because the two wires are stiff enough to keep them vertical. There were four potentiometers on the front too I kept as one panel. Also, I kept some of the vacuum tubes. They need high voltages to work so I won't be using them on my breadboard any time soon, but maybe I can use them for something interesting some day. The last things I kept were some canister diodes.

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

First Post

Hi! This is a blog about my electronics projects. A few months ago I bought an MSP430 LaunchPad and started learning about microcontrollers. Now I am experimenting and working on some ideas I have. Here I will post about the things I have been working on.

For the next 18 months or so I will be living and working abroad. It is a lot harder to get parts for my projects here but I always keep my eye out for any anything I can scavenge. Hopefully I can build some interesting things with the parts I find.