Ramsey ts1 kit - Touch Switch

Another awesome kit from Ramsey. Useful too. I'm using this one with a relay to switch a floor lamp that gets used quite a bit, as well as switch on/off the opposite end table lamp. That's right it's a dual switch. It also has the capabilities of doing duty as a momentary push button switch, or as an acutal toggle switch. Bloody brilliant guys. Kit comes with a pamphlet that has all the numbers/parts you need so you can check them off as you go. All through hole components, board is small and goes together really well. I highly recommend this for beginners who are looking to get into electronics, or for old hats who need a quick touch switch solution. Totally hackable since the pamphlet gives a rundown on how the circuit works and everything, Ramsey comes through again.

Happy whatever-the-heck-you-celebrate!

As the year ends people need to blow off steam a bit, and so there are several occasions that all occur around the end of the year. So no matter what you celebrate I hope you enjoy yourself. Unless your an ax murderer in which case... consider therapy.

So I picked up one of these for my desk at work, put it together while on staycation, thought my readers would like to check it out. Vellman has some great kits, this is one of them. Based on a two transistor multivibrator (calm down ladies) this kit blinks LEDs. (whoo hoo) but blinks them on a tree shaped PCB. For the price it really isn't a bad kit to put together for a little bit of festive. I will warn you that there is a +/- pins at the top of the tree, these connect to the input voltage. So if you put a LED there it will try to take the full input power. At 9V that's bad 'k? That's there so you can attatch your power wires there, into a 9v and hang it in the tree (cleverly hiding the 9v battery under a sign that says 'not a 9v battery') Typical Vellman kit with pamphlet explaining the circuit and checkoff as you go parts list. GREAT for beginners. Highly recommended.

Transistor Tester M328 H11888|26501

Here is another kit I got from Wish.They have a link to some directions, but It looked pretty suspicious being a dropbox and all, so I skipped that. The board itself is really all you need. The silkscreen has all the values on it, if your a novice the resistors are going to flip you out a bit. Not often you see .05% in kits like this but From what I can tell of the circuit it's warrented. The system itself can be powered by 9v or by an outlet, and you put a device on the test pad, or screw terminals, and it analyzes the device, telling you the Uf, and the B value, as well as the pinout, and if it's a NPN or PNP. I'm not positive what I tossed in there to test it with, I”ve a crap ton of transistors right now. I bought two of these, one for me and one for the local Makerspace (they need one fo-sho) Looks like a handy little tool for the shop, cheap enough if I break one I'm not too sad, and it's easy to put together if you pay attention to what your doing. As for Hackability, it runs on a ATMEGA328p and standard LCD screen. I'm sure with some clever Googling there is some code for this somewhere, I'd say, hack away. When I first put it together it didn't look like it was working. I adjusted the contrast till I saw 'timeout' tested again and it worked fine. It doesn't leave the values up for very long. I'd snap a pic of it so you can look at it later for reference. I'd love a pot that you can adjust the hold time on the results.

 

soundbox 16 / 120106 / BOX-16

Picked this up on amazon. The Silkscreen was awesome. Went together perfectly, and it worked the first time. The only thing I would change about this is add an actual power port, to the kit and a friggen OFF BUTTON. The power for module is a + and - on the board. I mistakenly put a capacitor there, which should be fine The switches on the side select which noise you are pissing people off with it. and there is control pins on the board you can hook into a uC and automatically piss people off. Very hackable device, and the circuit is mostly a bilateral switch chip and a quad nand gate some switches, and of course, a black blob. Black blob is the massive detriment to this kit. Perhaps sometime I'll take a look at the inputs and outputs of the blob, but not today.

0000: Machine gun voice
0001: Fire truck voice
0010: Ambulance voice
0011: The police car voice
0100: Crickets sound
0101: Alarm
0110: Electronic signal sound
0111: Koh
1000: Insect song
1001: Whistle
1010: Telegraph sound
1011: Bird song
1100: ChongJi gunfire
1101: Car sirens
1110: Bass instruments sound
1111: Racing sound