I’ve written a lot of theory stuff recently, so let’s talk about practical stuff for a bit.

Putting in the big order

After researching online, I found that Farnell was about the best place to buy things. So I created an account, and ordered two items, mostly to see if it worked. Well obviously it did, and I ended up with a bench power supply and some breadboard.

I used the power supply and the existing wires I had to test out some of my LEDs. Well yes, they work. But I can buy a matching set of them for pennies, so there’s not much point struggling on with old, broken stuff.

Continue reading “Breadboards, stripboards and PCBs” →

Assessing current stock

Having decided to embark on this voyage — or at the very least, seriously investigate the feasibility of it — I dug out all my old electronics stuff that’s been sat in a draw for over half a decade. This, it turns out, amounts to… well, not a lot of anything useful.

Continue reading “Feasibility” →

How to make everything

Sometime last year, I was browsing around YouTube, when I stumbled upon a series of videos named “how to make everything”. They had one about making chocolate, another about making a suit, and so on.

But rather than just go out and buy the ingredients, the guy tries to actually make all this stuff from scratch, from the raw materials. Like, for the chocolate video, he actually flew all the way to South America and actually harvested the cocoa beans personally, and went through the whole process of fermenting, drying and roasting the beans. For the suit, he actually flew to Texas and personally picked cotton for, like, a day, and then spent another day spinning it into thread, and so on.

Continue reading “Genesis” →