My New Maker’s Notebook
I have been looking for a good quality notebook for some time now and finally decided I'd try this one. It's the Maker's Notebook found here. So far, I'm really impressed with it. Very good quality, lots of pages for ideas and the back even has some common IC pin outs, LED specs, etc. If you order it from the Maker's website you get some free stickers and the red elastic band to hold it closed, plus you are supporting a great community resource! I'm going to keep it close by and see if I can capture any of those fleeting ideas that seem to pop into my head at the most inopportune times. Without even using it for a few weeks, I can say I would definitely recommend this notebook for anyone seeking a handy way to keep their ideas organized. Thank you MAKE.
MAX7219 LED Driver With Arduino
I am working on a larger projected and have decided the Arduino ATMEGA328 (which seem to be hard to find in stock online) would be the best choice for the project. Seeing as how the project is going to utilize 7-Segment multi-digit displays (common cathode), I knew I had to find a LED driver, no other realistic way to drive the displays. Anyhow, I picked up some LED drivers from one of my favorite companies, MAXIM. I chose the MAX7219 as it's well documented and works with the existing LED driver Arduino library. This prototype was to ensure I had everything working as I would have expected. In this prototype, I utilized a fixed Rset value. I'll use a trim pot in my other project (which I'll write up next weekend). If you have any questions on wiring up one of these LED drivers with Arduino, check this site out and this one.
My First Published Instructable!
I've finally gotten around to publishing my first instructable! Have a read and as always, let me know what you think!
Share the wealth of knowledge…
For some time now, I've been educating myself on the basics of electrical engineering in a somewhat unorthodox manor, the internet! I've always been fascinated by the application of theory and creating tangible results from the wildest of concepts, so it was an obvious path to end up working with electronics.
Today it occurred to me that I have learned so much from the internet community of folks freely sharing their knowledge, that I needed to talk about the Creative Commons License. Knowledge should be free and it should be shared with anyone willing to take it! This is why I’m releasing all of my future work under the “Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License”. Quite a mouthful huh? Well, if you don’t already know what this license is, you need to read THIS. I strongly encourage everyone to follow in these footsteps and openly give away your knowledge! You can’t take it with you after all…
This work by Jay Collett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.