Machine Project

Electron wrangling for beginners

Instructor Name: Mark Allen
Email: m@machineproject.com

Schedule: Sundays from 4-8pm. June 12th, 19th, 26th and July 3rd

Course Description: Electron wranging for beginners is a hands on crash course in making stuff do stuff with electricity. Incredibly, this course will cover both the very popular and useful basic stamp microcontroller, and the basics of analog electronics. After 4 sessions of intense brain expansion you will bask in your new knowledge and “can do” attitude towards using electricity to make rad art. How do we do this all in so short a time? By using Science.

What you’ll need: A computer (laptops are nice) with a serial port. If your computer is lacking a serial port you’ll need a usb to serial adaptor. Please buy the FTDI US232B USB to Serial Adapter as it works well on both Mac and PC. Windows or OSX. Let us know if you don’t have a laptop, we have a couple extra at the gallery for student use. All other parts and such are provided with the class fee.

Textbooks: We’ll be working from “Physical Computing” by Dan O’ Sullivan and Tom Igoe. Last I checked it was $20 on Amazon, I’d recommend buying it but whatever. Online documentation for the basic stamp is available at www.parallaxinc.com. I also recommend The Microcontroller Application Cookbook, by Matt Gilliland. In addition, I have an extensive collection of electronics and robotics textbooks which I will bring to class for you to check out.

Registration Fee: $250 (materials included). Sorry, this class is full.

Lab: Each meeting will consist of a lecture and lab. During lab we will build and program circuits based on the concepts discussed in the lecture.

Weekly Outline:

Week one – introduction, the programming environment, digital output, basics of electricity. lecture notes
week two – digital input, more output, semiconductors lecture notes
week three – analog input, analog output, rctime, capacitors lecture notes
week four – servo motor control and sensor design lecture notes