Basic Electronics Workshop

This is a basic electronics class we could teach in cooperation with NYPL, both to attract a broader membership base and as a community service.

It's happening! The first iteration will be Introduction to Electronics.

Electronics workshop outline

The audience is intended to be an eclectic mix of beginners and people who have done a lot electronics without understanding the theory. All the lab exercises will be very basic. Some of the theory will be "fundamental" in the sense that it will be at an advanced level, but will not assume much prior knowledge. Students with little electronics knowledge should have the patience to daydream when they don't understand the theory and wait for the fun practical stuff.

Topic	Parts
Batteries, voltage	9V battery
Resistive load, Ohm's law, energy, charge, voltage, potential, work	Incandescent bulb
How breadboards work, how to read a schematic	Solderless breadboard
Lighting an LED at different brightnesses	Different color LEDs, current limiting resistors, pushbutton switch
Kirchoff's voltage law and voltage dividers
Resistors in series and parallel
How to read a datasheet
LEDs in parallel and series
Capacitors, filter the LED output
Transistor switches, buzzer	2N3904, buzzer
Introduction to transistor theory	2N3904

Parts kit

Parts with negligible cost are not listed. We could try to limit ourselves to parts in this kit + maybe some logic chips.

9V batteries	$3
9V battery clip
Male jumpers	$2
Incandescent bulb
Breadboard	$2
LEDs	$1
Pushbutton, other switches	$2
Caps
2N3904
Resistor 220, 1K, 10K
Potentiometer 10K

(Students must buy multimeter themselves.)

Total $15?

Older stuff

Grand Street Settlement Electronics Demonstration

Topics/experiments:

• Batteries
• LED (driven by a series resistor)
• Basics of voltage, resistance and current
• Pushbutton switch to turn LED on/off
• Small DC motor
• Switching motor with a transistor
• 555 timer, astable mode, blink LED
• Audio frequency 555
• Light sensitive blinker with photoresistor
• Joule thief

Astable 555

Both breadboard and PCB.

Parts

• Breadboard
• 555 (low power version that works with CR2032)
• 10uF electrolytic cap
• 10K resistor
• 10K pot
• 0.01uF bypass cap
• LED

Constant current LED driver

With LED voltage reference. Breadboard only.

Parts

• Breadboard
• Red LED as voltage reference
• Resistors: 55 ohm (20 mA), 110 ohm (10 mA), 22 ohm (50 mA), 11 ohm (100 mA)
• Blue, white LEDs to be powered
• 2N3904
• 9V clip
• 9V battery

Joule thief

Circuit is from Instructables user qs

It works!

Parts

• PCB $0.446 (but given away free as schwag)
• Battery holder $0.7867
• Switch $0.5014
• 100K resistor $0.0312
• 68uH inductor $0.105
• White LED (4x) $1.008
• BC337 $0.13
• BC327 $0.11
• 150pF cap (FK18) $0.12
• 10uF cap (FK24) $0.20
• 100nF cap (FK18) $0.10
• 1N4148 $0.07

BoM $3.1623, retail $10